Chaos
by Summer Laura
Summary: House finds Chase in a dangerous situation. It'll take a whole lot to save him from that. Spoilers loose ones for "Help Me". Please R/R. I deleted this story by mistake and along with it all of my lovely reviews. I'm sorry, if you are still reading.
1. Chapters 1 to 16

_**NOTE – REPOST – Such an idiot, I was, and I deleted the whole thing by mistake – along with my lovely 125 reviews! **_

_**If you liked this before then please let me know. I was so proud of my 125 reviews and it was really annoying and frustrating to lose everything!**_

_Title - Chaos _

_Rating - at present, I guess – won't always be_

_Pairing – Will be House/Chase (although friendship/slash I don't know, yet)_

_Disclaimer – Not mine. Never mine. Never will be. Wish they were._

_Summary - – House lives in chaos. He also thrives in it. My own little AU version of "Help Me", the season finale so spoilers for that. Liberties taken, obviously - the only parts I'm really using are Cuddy's jarring news and the collapse-incident itself…_

_Could end up epic length...haven't got a clue, actually..._

**PARTS 1 – 3 **

House saw a rock fall once, a stone avalanche, caving down the side of a mountain-side. He was fifteen. He'd been on a sightseeing trip in Canada in a train-car and he'd been close enough to feel the rumble beneath his feet as the earth moved.

He'd seen a tree fall, uprooted, tumbling down into the deep abyss and he'd watched open-eyed and elated as it made its descent. Some of the other kids had found it chilling, screaming and crying. They'd feared for their lives, but House had just watched in awe as nature had her way with the world. Perilous. Petrifying.

"We're all gonna die," he heard, admidst the screams, the cries, the tears of these boys that pretended to be men but were children, in this moment.

The boy beside him clung to him as if House, alone, could safe him.

"Greg," the boy choked, "we're gonna fall."

"So be it," he whispered under his breath, offering no comfort as he stared into the chasm beneath them.

It had been such a rush, that danger, that terror of seeing the drop edging closer and closer. He had watched with morbid interest as he imagined what it would be like to fall with the stones.

It would be a theme for his life.

He didn't know it then, but that moment defined him; still defines him.

(*)

House's favourite painting is apocalyptic.

Chaos, painted in oil.

The canvass is large and foreboding. Busy. Disorganized. The sky is red and black. It's falling, falling down onto a world without order; a world of destruction and fire, of Hell and Fury. A world of severed limbs hang loosely from broken bodies, their faces full of pain, their mouths twisted in silent screams.

He likes it because it's hopeless. He likes it because it's real; because life isn't all Monet; isn't daffodils and lilies and soft, smiling faces…

"Cruelty," he says, "is in the nature of man. We're all out for ourselves. We're a herd of selfish bastards all waiting to trample each other to death, my beautiful ones."

Chase frowned at him when he heard those words, months ago, told him that he was cynical, to which House responded with a simple "Vogler."

"You see," he continued, "even our angel-faced Brit has a demonic side. We're all just carnivores, here."

"Spoken by a man who has never lived or loved," Thirteen had added, as if her words added weight to the argument.

House had smiled; called her an innocent girl and told her to repeat the sentiment when she was forty when she'd actually lived a little before biting his lip in mock apology with regard to the fact that she most likely wouldn't live at all.

"You see? Cruelty. It's the measure of a man. It's how nature intended us to be."

Life is chaos.

Life is chaos and we're all in nature's hands.

(*)

To many, this collapse is apocalyptic; a tragedy, small in scale but large in impact. All around there is grey. Grey smoke, rising from cracks in the ground. Grey rubble and debris spreading over spaces in the Earth that used to be green. House wonders momentarily how long it will be before flowers grow there again, how long before nature would forgive man for creating the very monstrosity that fell.

It's a war-zone, here, Ground Zero for many. 100 involved, ten confirmed dead already. Survivors were shipped off in white vans with flashing lights, their Chariots of Salvation conveying them to a half-life, for awhile, on drips and machines and, if they're lucky, for a second chance at full-life once their man-made recoveries were complete.

They'd thank God.

House would thank Princeton Plainsboro.

There's a man in black with his eyes closed, his lips mouthing a silent prayer for a man who cannot hear him. The cross around his neck gives him away as a priest. The total lack of dirt on his body tells House that he wasn't involved in the collapse yet flocked to it, like all of those God-givers do.

They think they can make a difference.

They think they can grant absolution.

"He's dead," House tells the priest, whose eyes are filled with tears for those he did not know. It's a concept that is alien to House, crying for strangers, wasting bodily fluids on those that don't know your name. "Save your prayers for someone who could use them."

"I was performing the Last Rites."

"You're too late for that. You think God gave a damn when he let the damn thing fall?"

He shakes his head.

"That's what bothers me about the whole religion thing. It's so…selective."

Because God is responsible for miracles…but he sits back and does nothing when there's tragedy.

(*)

His own tragedy isn't caused by God. No, he did this all by himself.

For a second, House flatlines.

The words, they strike him harder than any of this strikes him, delivered in spent exhaustion by a woman whose life he makes a misery.

"I'm getting married," she says, as she tries to make him understand. "I don't love you, House."

He doesn't hear past her telling him to move on; move on, because she has. Because everyone has.

Move on…

All he hears is the screaming. The pain. The chaos all around him.

(*)

She's assisting Taub when he speaks to her again, pressing down hard on a hopeless wound that'll never heal. Taub tries his best to talk the patient round but they call all see she's fading.

"She's hopeless," House says, matter-of-factly, "but there's someone underneath the building that could use some help."

Taub doesn't speak, doesn't respond. He whispers to the young woman that she should concentrate on his voice; that she'll be fine and that she's doing great.

"House…"

Cuddy's voice. Softer than before but no less…tired.

"I heard something down there. Movement. There's someone down there."

She sighs. Her blue eyes look dull and empty.

She's tired, and House knows it.

"There's nobody down there, House. They've checked twice over. There's no movement. No sound. Nobody is alive down there."

"You're wrong," House glares, and for a moment there is silence; silence which suggests those two words stretch across more than her assertion that there is nobody breathing in that dank, dark place.

She pauses. Stops breathing, for a moment.

He's daring her and she knows it; daring her to plead with him to stay; defiantly forcing her to care.

"Don't go down there," she repeats, but there's nothing in her face that gives him what he wants. She won't feed him. She won't feed…that.

In a sense, it's like telling a small child not to touch; telling a man with vertigo not to look down. He crawled into a black space the moment he realised he'd lost her for good. What difference would that be?

How desperate she looks…

How desperate she looks when she tells him "Don't do this now. This isn't the time or the place…"

"What would it matter if the building fell on me, now?"

He holds off on saying "The world already has," but she's already gone, her black ponytail still and motionless, caked with the dirt of the night.

He hates watching her leave. How many times has he been left behind, feeling like the sky is falling, just like in that painting? He watches her go and for a moment he's falling down that chasm, back when he was young, but he pushes that feeling aside to prove a point.

He claws his way back up.

"You're wrong," he shouts out after her…but, she doesn't hear him.

He looks up to Thirteen's vivid eyes, her hands covered in blood, her face full of disbelief. She looks tired. They all look tired.

"Don't," she says, but that's all she says.

House doesn't know what she's forbidding him to do; doesn't care.

"Back to your needlework," he replies, his voice cold but his face distracted. "Might as well make the most of it before your hands shake so much you can't even fasten your own bra."

(*)

He crawls into that space, that space that's too small, too tight, too claustrophobic. The walls are warm around him. Stable for now, they give the illusion of safety, like crawling back up into the womb or something equally metaphorical.

House likes to be encased; enclosed. Before his leg became mangled and twisted he'd sleep curled up so tightly his arms and legs would be dead by morning. He'd awaken slowly, relishing in the feeling of pins and needles bringing his limbs back to life as he unravelled himself from his chosen position.

These days, he just feels like he's unravelling.

"Is anybody down here?"

He wonders why they'd be more likely to answer now than when he was out there in the wide, open world; why they'd respond to him now that he's risking his life to prove himself right.

"Come out, come out wherever you are."

His voice doesn't echo. It's muffled, stifled by grime and dirt. It mattresses the sound, cushions it, deadens it. There are no acoustics in a tight, underground tomb. He hears nothing, not a scratch, not a breath, not a movement.

"Damn it, don't make me admit that I was wrong. I don't do wrong. I'm infallible. Like God. And, unlike God, I'm actually down here to help you."

It's a dare. The tone of his voice is challenging, a word often used to describe him in gentle terms. This is a game to him, like anything else, and House doesn't like to lose. Not in front of them. Not in front of her.

Especially not in front of her…

He's about to admit defeat when he sees it as the dust clears, as he drags that useless leg of his behind him a few extra yards until he finds a little space.

He sees something. Something bright. Something…moving.

"Bingo," he says, as if he's won, but he hasn't.

He hasn't won at all.

(*)

There's a strip of luminous yellow, bright against black. It glares as the torchlight bounces from it. House knows, then, knows before he re-directs the light because he's mocked this garment before just as he's mocked this man before.

He recognises the sneakers, white, black, red, flashes back to the "potato, potahto" argument which raged on daily as to whether they're sneakers or trainers because Brits have such a ridiculous grasp of the English language.

He almost wishes for the correction, the exasperated sigh, the voice that tells him "I'm Australian."

There are no words.

He realises, now, that he hasn't seen him; that he could account for all of his other employees (Taub, speaking so softly to dying patients…Thirteen, stitching up little girls whilst their frantic mothers looked on…) but not this one. He was too busy in chaos to even notice he was missing.

"Don't move," he says, as if the other man could. It's obvious already that he's trapped; trapped beneath fallen rock, stone, cement, paving stones.

He can feel his own heart beating in his chest. It's fast, too fast.

He tries to catch his breath, to calm himself, but the sight before him terrifies him.

He knows that the leg is badly broken because that straight, yellow line is bent at a right-angle, twisted around a twisted limb. His eyes glance around, scouring for further injury. He sees a thin metal bar, supportive iron, perhaps, disappearing into an arm that doesn't move, just hangs limply from a trembling body.

There's blood painting that grey shirt red and there are those colours, again, those colours that tone that damn painting.

House hears a gasp for breath and it stills him, momentarily. So pained, it is, choked and desperate.

"God, Chase…"

A name, spoken like a prayer; a whispered word. A word devoid of the usual malevolence in which House addresses him, replaced with something akin to shock. Fear.

Terror, even, because cruelty is the nature of man…but, sometimes, so is this.

In torchlight Chase looks paper-thin. He's paled by dirt and dust covering him like a second-skin. His breathing is shallow and rapid; trembling, like the walls around him and it's worrying how unstable they look, he AND the walls. His eyes, normally so vivid, look dull, almost dead.

His tears have left tracks on his cheeks, have wiped away the dust and the blood. That image, more than anything, strikes House like a fist and he's reeling, reeling fast until he pulls himself in.

"What did you do, come down here to hibernate? Too lazy to dig your own burrow so you thought you'd just move into this one? And, here was me thinking Koalas hibernated up trees. What were you thinking?"

Chase doesn't respond. Can't. He can't see but for the bright light shining in his face; can't hear but for the screaming sound of ringing in his ears. He can't speak because the pain gags him as effective as a hand across his mouth pressing down, down.

Instead, he chokes, wordless, soundless, sightless.

Blind. Deaf. Dumb.

"Trying to play hero, were you? I bet you heard a cat. A dog. A racoon, even. You come down here chasing rabbits?"

Again, no response. Just a whimper. A rattle. House imagines him down here when it all first fell, eyes closed just like that priest up there, mouthing a plaintive prayer that would go unheard by that great big empty space in the sky.

Sad to think, really.

Sad, or pathetic.

"Jesus Christ, Chase," says the Atheist, cursing the son of an entity he doesn't believe in as he edges towards a Fatherless child.

Suddenly, what's going on out there doesn't matter.

She doesn't matter, either.

Nothing does…only this, here.

Only him.

Part 2

His skin is clammy and cold; tacky, in a sense, to touch. His eyes, they're glassy and overly bright.

His pulse is thready, respiration shallow.

He's virtually non-responsive when House reaches him, doesn't shy away from touch but doesn't acknowledge it either.

Depending on his mood, in normal circumstances, he will either sit still and allow himself to be touched or will pull away, sensitive to the point of anger, petulant to the point of adolescent…

Sometimes, he will allow House to ruffle his hair; to bounce that red and white ball from the back of his head. Other times he will turn and glare; will tell House that he's not some lapdog that'll take anything from him.

Sometimes, House catches him touching the arm of the person he's talking to, gently coaxing, prompting, exposed as opposed to protected but that's rare…that's rare…

"Broken leg, broken ribs…"

He presses a stethoscope against an injured body, cold metal against damp skin…

"…lungs sound good. No sign of pneumothorax. You're lucky."

House reels off injuries as if they're items on a shopping list, a detachment cultured by years of not giving a damn.

"Looking at that lump on your head I'd say possible skull fracture. Your pupils aren't fixed. You're glazed and distant. Definite concussion. What do you think?"

No response. No acknowledgment. House believes it proves his point that there is, indeed, a fracture; that there may well be a brain injury lurking beneath.

"Come on, Chase. Where's that British humour? You've got to give me something."

The boy gives him nothing. House isn't quite sure what he was expecting but it wasn't this silence, this eerie nothingness.

He touches Chase's fingers, the ones attached to that captive arm. They respond to the touch by curling inwards, a good sign. House tries to concentrate on the things he can deal with; the injuries he can treat.

He tries to deal with the things he can do, rather than the things he can't.

It's the arm that's causing the problem. House touches that metal rod, the rod that's impaling Chase to the ground and it elicits the first true physical response from him, though perhaps its more reflex and instinct than conscious movement. He winces. Then, he chokes. His eyes roll suddenly back until a sharp slap to the side of his face brings him back to the world.

"Wake up. No sleeping. You're on the job. Pretty boys like you don't need beauty sleep."

It feels like a hammer blow. Chase's lips move but no sound comes out. This pale, this grey, this soundless…it's like a silent movie, down here.

"Seriously, am I that boring?" House asks, again no longer expecting a witty comeback, no longer requiring one. "You're my captive audience, Chase. The least you can do is appreciate me."

The rod's gone in just above the elbow. There's an entry wound and an exit wound. House can only imagine the pain, every tiny vibration sending it up through his shoulders, every attempted movement making white-waves behind his eyes. It's gone through him as if he were nothing more than chicken meat at a barbecue; as if his flesh were no stronger than that.

He can feel a pulse in the wrist, though.

"Blood flow to the hand doesn't seem compromised," he says. "We're not going to cut it off, just yet."

It's is lodged into the ground. Looking upwards, it appears to be supporting a large part of this fallen debris. To move it would cause the sky to fall, in a sense. To try to jerk it free would ensure both of their deaths. If House were to 'meet his maker' he'd be happy if it were with Chase, could hide behind the biblical kid like he used to hide behind his older, taller friends trying to get into nightclubs underage.

"Well," he mutters, under his breath, "neither of us are dying tonight so there'll be no need for gatecrashing."

Chase's teeth begin to chatter as his body starts to tremble more fiercely. He's in a cold sweat, looks alabaster-pale in this dim, dim light. He needs fluids, drugs, oxygen, though he doubts that would be allowed down here for fear of a gaseous explosion.

"You're in shock," House says, stating the obvious, as he removes his jacket and places it over his stricken employee before the shock hits him further. Harder.

"You need help. Even a guy as special as me can't do this alone."

Because, if he stays much longer they could both be trapped. Forgotten. Abandoned. Sealed up as if in some Medieval punishment gone bad.

The only saving grace is that Chase doesn't appear lucid. House checked him over quietly as he assessed his physical state. Responds to pain. To light. Doesn't respond to verbal commands. He totted up his Glasgow Coma Scale and it's pretty conclusive that Chase would be oblivious to his absence, at this point in time.

Still, it's hard to leave him.

"Nice talking to you, kid. As enlightening as ever."

He will emerge from this underground womb a victorious butterfly, having found a lost lamb amongst the insanity. He will stare into Cuddy's face and ask her, "Did his life mean so little to you that you wouldn't even send anyone down there to help him?"

He will glare at Lucas and tell him "You're marrying a heartless wench."

He will receive the hero's accolades, the platitudes of graciousness as they carry this broken boy out, damaged but living, from the tomb they wanted to leave him in…

He will look into Chase's eyes and tell him "Nobody gave a damn but me."

He moves. Then, he feels the Earth move as the instability of this place shows itself and it begins to crumble, a familiar feeling, reminiscent of his life, these days. It's not sulphur that rains down but rubble, gathering in his eyes and turning him ash-grey.

"You have got to be kidding," House growls but his voice does not carry over the angry rumble of this protesting place that tries to expel them from its very core or crush them in the process.

"Chase, are you still with me?"

Chase can't see any more, can only feel the sensation of rocks hitting his head.

He's blanketed.

Sensory deprivation.

He screams, the first sound he's made since House has been down here, the first sound that indicates he's capable of sound at all.

Then the rumbling stops, as if silenced by his plaintive wails, shamed by his terror.

House turns. The ash has cleared, now. Chase's mind is clearer and he's staring into eyes that can see him, finally, and they're not dead but pleading.

He's still screaming, be it from pain, fear, House doesn't know but he makes a mental note of his sudden increase in brain activity; thinks that perhaps the kid would notice him gone, after all.

"Stop yelling, Chase," House warns, because the sound unnerves him and he doesn't know what to do; because he's scared that it's going to make matters worse, for him or for Chase he doesn't know. "Man up. You scream like a girl. There's not enough oxygen down here for amateur dramatics."

It gets through to him. The noise abates, leaving behind only remnants of sound. Chase can't catch his breath. There is only a whimpering sound that escapes him, now.

His eyes are so bright and so wet they make him look like a five year old child.

He grasps for House with his good arm, so beside himself he can't even gather the co-ordination to do that right. It bothers House. It bothers him, to be needed this much.

"Chase," House whispers, "please."

Blue eyes bear into Chase, imploring him to be calm. If he were more alert he'd see hidden signs in those eyes; panic, behind the demanding intensity.

"This place is unsteady," House warns, softly. "You're a clever kid. You know all about vibrations in unstable structures."

The only thing Chase knows, in this moment, is pain. The only thing he's known for the past hour is solitude and a desperate need for escape.

The only thing he wants is not to be alone.

It takes a lot to gather himself to accomplish the feat of talking but he manages, somehow, draws the strength from God knows where.

His words are childlike. Desperate.

They're the words of a man who fears for his very life; who does not want to be alone should the final curtain fall upon him in a haze of dust and grime.

"Don't…leave…."

Don't leave.

Don't go.

"Please…"

The desperation makes House want to do the opposite of staying. The intense need makes him want to run to the other end of the Earth, just like he wanted to run away from that kid on the train-car.

"I'm sorry," he says, "but I have to. You need help. I need supplies. I can't patch you up with a First Aid kit."

"D-don't…"

"Places to be, kid. People to see."

"Dark…"

"Oh, now, come on. You're telling me you're afraid of the dark? I'll be back. Just…sit tight. Be a good boy. And, if you see mommy or daddy down here in the dark, just…pinch yourself. Alright?"

"House, please…"

It's mournful. It's broken. It's a young man begging not to be abandoned again; pleading not to be left in the dark, in the unknown.

House looks down. His eyes flicker.

It's too much.

"Sorry," he whispers under his breath.

Human nature; it's often cruel, but it's cruel to be kind.

If House looked back now he'd see human nature at its basest; its most raw, Chase's arm reaching out towards him as if the world had been taken in this moment; as if his one lasting salvation was slipping out of his fragile grasp.

Perhaps it would change House, in a way.

Perhaps it would open his eyes.

Part 3

The ascent is treacherous.

The journey up, it's laden with danger, with jagged edges that cut into his skin; that leave him bleeding and raw. House dares this cavern to beat him, challenges it to take him down knowing that it never will.

He glances back. Quietly, he tells it to contain Chase; to keep him safe at least until he returns so the kid doesn't die alone. This abandonment is paved with good intention, House tells himself, as the image of his broken, bleeding, scared little wombat is ingrained on his mind like a subliminal image that Keeps. On. Playing.

House, please. Don't leave.

Not leaving. In children's terms, this is a so-called act of love. House is sure he read that, somewhere.

He wonders how many acts of love Chase felt, growing up, whether they were as few and far between as the acts that House, himself, felt.

Then, he tries not to think about that at all.

He holds a white handkerchief in front of him, emerging with it held aloft to ward off the dust. It looks like a white flag. It resembles surrender. He struggles out of that thin opening, a difficult birth, a such, and ever the mother-to-be, Cuddy rushes to his side with a swiftness that sends a pang through House's chest.

His mind tells him she doesn't care but his heart? Well. He stopped listening to his heart years ago when he realised that every human being is meant to be alone.

She looks frantic. Angry, even.

"House, what were you doing down there? You could have got yourself killed. Don't we have enough to worry about without you wandering off like a disobedient toddler?"

She's stern. Overbearing.

"Look at you. Can you not listen to simple instructions? There are patients that need you. God knows we're desperate for all the help we can get."

She says it like she means it but there are still tears in her eyes. This is the kind of mother she'd be; strict but glistening. Solid yet soft, her real emotions always showing in the blueness set back against black, black lashes.

House knows that Rachel will walk all over her; that Lucas will roll around on the floor and play Barbie and Ken but the child will lack discipline.

He imagines ten years from now; Cuddy, the downtrodden. Lucas, the man-child with a penchant for Xbox and no time for his wife and child.

"Just…get out. Get out, before you lose the use of your other leg."

She holds out her hand. He doesn't take it, pushes her aside as he drags himself to the surface. He's no longer drowning on dust but the expression on his face shows that he's still submerged down there.

"You don't want my help? Fine. Just…don't be a hindrance, House. This is not the time and place."

Listen to her, all high and mighty, all big and tough and forceful and strong.

Look at her, so over him.

Four words stop her dead in her tracks.

He calls her back. Calls her out as he brushes dust from his hair; as he lets those pieces of grey dust fall back to the Earth where they belong.

"Chase is down there," he says, and the tone of his voice suggests he's blaming her for it. It's defiant. It's accusatory. "If I don't get back down there in the next few minutes then you're going to be an employee down. Now, you can either assist me or you can go to Hell but you won't stop me from saving myself the job of re-interviewing on Monday morning."

She turns to look at him, expects this to be a joke, a House speciality. It wouldn't be the first time he's used one of his team to strike the fear of God into her chest.

She looks into his eyes.

She sees no humour, no joke, no malice – only determination.

"Chase…"

"You know him, Cuddy. Blond hair, nice mouth – prettier than you. He was here an hour ago. I take it you sent him off to find someone to patch up? Guess he thought he'd be the hero and look underneath the ground."

She swallows hard. The lump in her throat feels like a boulder. The scratch in her chest is akin to swallowing the gravel that surrounds her.

"Whilst you were busy patching up hopeless cases with the rest of the idiots I was having a nice, one-sided conversation with our resident Aussie. I told him I wouldn't be long so, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to get back to him before he dies of shock."

The last words are spat out, rather than spoken.

He's making this personal but he doesn't know why.

"There are people that can go down there, House. People that aren't you. It's their job to rescue people from unstable buildings. You don't have to…"

His expression is maverick. Definitive.

He cuts her off before she absolves him of his responsibility.

"When did I ever duck out of a physical challenge, Cuddy? Go mollycoddle someone else."

(*)

The man's name is Jeff. He's thirty-nine years old and House is enamoured with the fact that his uniform includes a bright yellow, metal plated helmet, of sorts. He estimates the guy weighs about 200lbs; that he could bench-press House until it was Housed that cried off with exhaustion.

House carries a backpack that's full to the brim and Jeff carries a drill, amongst other things; instruments of his trade designed to release whilst House's are designed to relieve.

"How far down is he?" Jeff asks, as he touches the walls for stability.

"Oh, not too much further. Guess he gave up when the walls started to cave in on him. And, to think I trained him to be tough and resilient."

Jeff thinks that House's sarcasm masks his fear but he's an emergency technician, nothing more, and he chooses not to psychoanalyse for fear of making things more tense than they already are.

It's Jeff that reaches Chase first, a ghost of a man in a death-trap.

It's Jeff that holds a hand out to Chase when his eyes fill with panic; when he begins to hyperventilate because this isn't House, because he wanted House, because House is the only one who can help him and, damn it, House is the only one he needs, right now.

"It's okay," Jeff reassures, "It's alright. I'm here to help. We're here to get you out of here."

We. He said 'we'. Chase focuses on the we and tries to make sense of it through all of this pain. He focuses on the pronoun and tries to make it mean something.

"Just calm down. You're going to pass out. Deep breaths, come on. In. Out. In. Out."

He said this to his wife when she was giving birth to Aidan. Lamaze class. Calming techniques and ways to relieve pain.

Jeff is good at his job…but, he's not good at this.

"Hou…H….House…" Chase tries to say, but he can't get his words out for choking on them. They're stillborn in the air, just as his composure is.

"Save the hysterics, Robbie, I'm here."

The voice. That voice. That voice is like the voice of God, to Chase, and as it edges closer it's like a prayer has been answered.

"You need to focus on your breathing, Chase. I can't give you oxygen down here. It's too unstable. Since I don't know the extent of your head injury I can't afford to have you passing out."

Chase doesn't care what House is saying; doesn't hear.

All he hears is that voice…that voice that came back.

All he hears is that man that didn't leave.

"Knew…knew you wouldn't…go."

"What can I say? You Aussies are so up on your boomerangs. They go away but they always come back."

Softer, then, atypically so.

"I wouldn't leave you."

He looks worse, to House. Clammier. Paler. Sicker. The only saving grace is that he's more alert, more able to tell House what hurts, where it hurts, what he needs, what will help.

"Can you…get me out? P-please?"

"Jeff, here, is a master of all things construction and disaster. He's going to free your arm and I'm going to work my magic on you."

Chase tries to smile. There is blood on his teeth and House tries his best to ignore it.

"Gonna…turn me into…W-Wilson?"

"Oh, hush. Why would I do that? If there is any man I'd hate to be stuck in an underground tomb with it's Wilson. Too whiny. Too much to say for himself. I'd much prefer you. You're easier to play with."

"Thanks."

He's trying to lighten the tone, trying to keep Chase with him by making things as normal as possible.

He's trying to keep him calm by minimising the situation; by playing down its severity.

When Chase closes his eyes House smile fades for a moment, though, allowed for one split second to face reality out of his vision.

It fades even further when Chase opens his eyes.

"House," he whispers, as if it's the first time he's seen him. "I didn't know you were down here too, House."

"Yeah," House replies, his eyes grave and his thoughts running away with him. "Coincidence that I bumped into you, huh?"

Memory loss. Confusion. Disorientation.

All signs point to a brain injury that cannot be controlled in such dire circumstances.

"A-am I okay?" Chase asks, weakly. "Are…you okay?"

"We're great. Hunky dory. In fact, you and me will pull on our glad-rags and head out for some Margueritas once we're out of here. How does that sound?"

The smile is giddy. Dazed.

It's worryingly thin.

"Sounds great, House. Just great."

The truth is, Chase is fading fast, losing blood, perhaps bleeding internally. His body's in shock, perhaps damaged to the point of critical and there's no diagnostic tools in this Hell-hole to be able to tell if that's the case or not.

House looks to Jeff, whose face holds no joy and whose eyes hold no promise and he's pleading for something good; for something positive, just to put an end to the wretchedness of this God-forsaken day.

"I don't know, man," Jeff says, quietly, as he places a hand on the violent red beam that impales Chase to this very spot.

House bites his lip, all jokes aside, and warns him "You'd better find out, then."

**PARTS 4-6 **

Picture a fire. A fire, burning somewhere in the quiet of a forest. Hot, white-hot, it increases by a thousand degrees each second that passes. Picture it engulfing you, burning you from the outside-in, a reverse napalm. A weapon of mass destruction.

Picture the house as human emotion; the desperate twist of a relationship.

The fire wouldn't touch House.

House has always been the King of his world, the master of his own universe. Up there, people bend to his will. They give to him freely whilst he takes without reservation.

Down here it's a different playground. There's room for little movement, scope for no error.

Picture the warmth of early Summer in Melbourne, on the beach, on the seafront. Thousands of tourists come here to paint themselves golden but this is home to you. You're golden already, always have been. It's no novelty to you, the sun, but there's sand between your toes and the sea's turning it dusky brown. Camel-coloured. You like the way the sea laps away at your feet.

"Mmmm," Chase murmurs, aloud, "my feet feel all wet."

Wet. Wet and warm. The dust and the dirt, that's the sand between his toes.

Behind his closed eyes he feels the splash of the ocean around his ankles. The reality is that his leg is broken; that the dancing nerves he feels in that stricken foot is transforming itself in his equally stricken brain.

"Surf's good today, House."

"I'm sure it is. Unfortunately, since we're stuck underground with only big Jeff for company it's unlikely we're going to be catching any waves any time soon."

Just like that he shatters the illusion but Chase doesn't flinch.

He just lets his mind wander.

He just lets his head create a world less painful where the sun is high in the sky and these sensations he is feeling is nothing more than the heat of the sun burning down on him.

There's a rumble up ahead, a motion in the brickwork. House freezes. Chase murmurs something about air pressure; thunder.

His lucidity is flickering.

On, off. On, off.

"Doesn't sound too healthy," Jeff states, as he takes his measurements, as he makes his estimations. He doesn't sound particularly worried, which helps, but this is still untrodden territory for House.

"Real rumbling in the bowels, that was."

"Yeah, because the building's full of bad gas," House replies. "It's eaten something bad. I wouldn't recommend the sushi, Jeff, it'll have you sounding just like this God damn building."

"Hey, man, I was just making light."

"Yeah? Well…go make light with your tape measure and your drill saw and get us the Hell out of here."

He knows that Jeff is doing his best. He knows the estimation has to be exact.

He knows the man's looking for alternatives; easy escape routes that will keep them all safe and alive but it's tough.

It's tough being down here with no guarantees; with a patient that's not right; not stable.

House's hands are shaking so badly he doesn't know if he's capable of inserting this hollow needle into Chase's veins, a sharp tongued snake that will drip life into him in a place where the sun doesn't reach.

He tells Chase it's vodka; that it's better all round if he's drunk and stupid because everyone knows that pain means nothing to an intoxicated mind.

"I should make it a stipulation of your employment that you lighten the Hell up at least once a week, Chase. Don't you ever want to drown yourself in Cosmos like normal pretty boys your age?"

"More of a 7-Up man myself," Chase murmurs. "Learned that from Mum. Vodka never did her any favours."

He's smiling when he says it, weak and fragile in voice, quiet and strained. It's as telling as he's ever been. Honest. Open. While some might see it as a man in agony simly lacking the will and the power to keep his own secrets, House sees it as another symptom. Pressure in his brain, perhaps, causing him to act out of the norm.

He tests the water, sees how far he can push him.

Sees if he'll break into a thousand pieces, a puzzle that House has always wanted to crack.

"Your dad ever get drunk?"

"Dad? Nah. Too busy fucking one of his interns to have time to let himself go."

A quick response. No time for processing what is said and what is unsaid.

House pushes it a little further. Deeper. He wants to see just how lacking in inhibitions this knock to the head has made the boy.

"He ever beat your mother?"

There's not even a beat. Not even a pause for thought. Sadness, though, in his voice. In his tone.

"He never even looked at her." Then softer, quieter. "Hitting her would've meant giving a damn."

The shaking has stopped, now, nerves abated. House looks down at his fingers then back at his 'patient'. His breathing has slowed a little, his eyes closed.

He's resting his head against a steel ledge and his face is pained and confused. House wonders if he knows, now, what he's said; if his brain has caught up to the fact that his mouth ran away with him without reservation.

"Chase?"

He doesn't respond and House allows him this moment to gather himself. To return to the norm.

He inserts the needle into Chase's free hand, effectively immobilising him, binding him. He flinches a little but is brave, doesn't cry out, though his nerve endings seem to close to the skin and he's as brittle as bone china.

The sensation, to Chase, is familiar as the needle is set in place; as it's taped securely, the thin, clear tubing looped back on itself as Chase loops back, too.

His thoughts fade.

His mind, it wanders.

He's ten years old. He's lying alone in a hospital bed propped up by pillows that make his neck hurt, so feverish that his hair sticks to the back of his neck, soft-blond against tanned skin turned pale.

His eyes are overly bright against the dim colour of his complexion and he blinks back tears, not wanting to appear childlike; wanting to be a man, like they always tell him to be, but he's not a man. He's not a man but a ten year old boy and he's so sick that they won't let him go home.

His mother sits beside him but her mind is elsewhere. She stares out of the window as if she's waiting for something to come and take her.

He gasps in pain as another ripple enters his stomach; as another wave makes is way up to his throat. He gags to stop himself from vomiting.

He doesn't cry out for mother, for father. Mother wouldn't listen anyway and Father is never around.

She doesn't even hold his hand when they insert the needle into his vein; when they fix a drip and don't even tell him what it's for.

She just tells him to be quiet, because that's all she ever wanted. For him to be quiet.

Father just wanted him to be perfect.

He closes his eyes. He chokes on the memory, for a short while.

He mouths the word "Dad" but no sound escapes his lips.

Back then, it wouldn't have mattered if he'd shouted it from the rooftops. He wouldn't have came; wouldn't have cared.

House adjusts the drip. The flow. He pushes enough painkiller through the plastic opening to make him comfortable whilst he sets the leg.

He knows it won't be enough.

The bubbles lick away at Chase's insides and when he swallows it's a rush. Intoxication. His body sways a little but all he can do is curl over and smile. A hand moves to steady him. It's warm. That's enough.

His father's hands were never warm…but House's hands are.

"Idiot," House whispers. "I'd make a terrible father. I'd steal all of your birthday money. I'd get you a computer instead of a car. I'd hit on your girlfriends."

House would make a terrible father…but, already he's better than the father Chase had and lost.

Under the pretense of securing the tape securing the IV tube his hand lingers on Chase's. It's momentary, lasts but a split second.

It's nothing. Means nothing.

To Jeff, an outside observer, it almost looks like he's comforting him.

Part 5

He takes out a 'bit' for Chase's mouth as if he were a horse; as if this were some 17th Century operation in a time when there was no better. It seems brutal; sado-masochistic. House knows of Chase's dabble with 'the other side', has heard it in hints and give-aways that he's not totally sure are the truth. He's spent long periods of time wondering whether Chase is all he seems to be or whether he drops these hints to appear interesting. Tough, even.

He's not so tough. He looks frightened. Awoken from his paternal daydream he's met with a reality no less nightmareish; more physically painful than mentally.

House's eyes don't look like his father's. There's light in them, for one thing.

There's concern.

He actually gives a damn.

"I want you to bite down on this," House says. "Number 1, it'll shut you up so I don't have to hear your Daddy issues. Number 2, this is going to hurt like nothing you've ever imagined and I don't want you to bite off your tongue."

He pauses, momentarily, before adding " – although, that would be a more permanent solution to the silence thing."

He tries to keep things as normal as possible, remembers an old saying about dogs in thunderstorms. Don't pamper them, they say, because then they'll know that something's wrong.

Don't change your behaviour because that will unsettle them even more.

"We'll free your arm once we've fixed the leg. You'll have a scar but you know what they say about chicks and scars. They don't say the same thing about cripples, I'm afraid."

"No," Chase says, frantic and desperate as House places a hand on his ankle, the ankle he can no longer feel, that is no longer part of his leg. The pulse is weakening to the foot and it's only a matter of time before it ceases completely; before the tissue begins to die away, no longer realising it's part of a living body.

"I see my crutch as a status symbol," House says, as he nods his head towards his constant companion; his shoulder to lean on. "You're not cool enough to pull it off, Chase, so don't even think about it."

"I'm not ready."

"Well, make yourself ready. We don't have time for this."

Small voice, lost somewhere inside of him, though his terror echoes from these dungeon walls.

"I don't want you to."

"Chase, I'd love to umm and ahh and bite my lip in indecision but you're going to lose your foot if I don't do something about it now. I know that'll do wonders in your quest to win back your ex but I can't see you surfing with a hook for a limb."

Quieter still. Meek, almost. Choked, definitely. "You don't understand."

"Trust me, Chase, I understand fine. I know pain. Why else do you think I swallow these little candy drops every hour and a half? It's certainly not to keep my weight down, although the nausea does help maintain my svelte figure."

He pushes Chase backwards, holding him in place with one hand. It's forceful. It's demanding. Chase eyes him defiantly but the sentiment doesn't last.

"Listen to me."

The look fades.

The painkiller can only do so much and this moment of lucidity is born from trepidation. It's the edgy nerves of one expected to jump over the edge of a deep abyss, facing his fear as he goes. Every time House moves, Chase flinches.

"Just…make it fast. Please."

He nods, giving permission. House knows this may well be his last moment of lucidity before they make the agonising decision over whether or not they need to remove his arm. Jeff kept citing structural instability and the possibility of total collapse. House uncharacteristically told him to get a second opinion, would cut a person's head open on a whim but not Chase. He couldn't do that to Chase.

He has to do this, though.

He doesn't prepare him, simply acts, knowing above all things that pulling off a band aid is best done quickly; without warning. Chase doesn't scream. He doesn't cry out, bites down instead, his cries held prisoner behind gritted teeth. The crunch of bone reminds House of a train with its brakes pulled tight, grinding along the tracks. It grates on his nerves, cotton wool pressed hard down between his fingers, nails down a chalkboard.

Chase reaches for him blindly in this dimly little, cavernous place.

House, nauseated himself by the act he's just performed, reaches back.

"Not much longer," he says softly, quietly.

He brushes the hair from Chase's forehead under the illusion of checking for fever or delirium. It's amazing how many acts of affection could be construed as necessary acts of medical intervention.

"Soft," Chase murmurs.

"Your skin? Your hair? No. Dry as a a bone."

"No, you."

You, Chase is saying. Soft.

"You're soft. Pretend to be…tough….hard…but you're not."

A strong accusation.

House pulls his hand back at the suggestion of something other than indifference, clutches it to his hand as if he's been burned.

Part 6

Consciousness flickering, Chase forgets himself, sometimes, forgets his place in the world and what world he is in. Everything that he is seems to be locked inside. His 'inner voice' seems disembodied as well as disembowelled.

"I'm tired," he keeps saying, over and over, because he feels as if he hasn't slept in six months and if his head were on properly he'd realise he's right.

Ever since Dibala. Ever since he took a man's life he's been suffering, deservedly, he might add.

He wonders if this is his punishment from God.

House keeps poking at him, asking him questions that he doesn't know the answers to; answers which are swimming around disjointed, trapped behind blood in his swelling brain.

That's the danger, the fact that his head is injured, the fact that he's seriously concussed and there's no way of telling the damage in a place like this.

"Listen to me," House tells him, "Answer me. This is important. Tell me the last thing you remember before coming down here."

Chase moans aloud. His brain misfires. He doesn't know the answer. He doesn't know why he's down here and he doesn't know why House is here, either.

He doesn't know where 'here' is and he doesn't know what year it is. Why should he know that? Why is that as important as this man says it is? Why is it important that he know what's outside; that he knows how it is that he came to be here in the first place?

"Stop messing around," House warns, "This could save your life."

Knowing the name of his mother could save his life? How?

At times, he doesn't know House, doesn't remember him, but then the name swims back through the haze and he wonders how on Earth he could forget such a man.

A good man. A genius.

The only man he'd trust with his life, he's always said, if his life turned out to be in danger.

The hand on his jaw shocks him. House forces him to look. Twenty-thousand shards of glass pass through Chase's head and he wants to scream but doesn't.

"Focus, Chase. Answer the question."

"Why?"

"I need to assess your head injury. It's just you and me alone down here until they can figure out how to get you out of here and if you want to keep your fucking arm then you'd better start co-operating with me."

If the head injury's proving critical it'll be a necessity. Lose the arm to save his life. Disfigure him to preserve him. He doesn't want to so that, will drill a hole in his skull here and now to relieve the God damned pressure if it means keeping him in one piece.

He doesn't want to do any of that…not to Chase…not to someone he gives a crap about…

Chase doesn't want to talk. He just wants to make this easier.

"H-heard a noise," he says, softly, but it's difficult for him to speak, right now. The combination of painkillers and pain itself leave him swimming in treacle. Everything is slow, so slow. So suffocating. "Thought there was a…a kid… down here."

He heard a scream. A cry.

He thought it came from beneath the ground.

"So, you thought you'd play Superman and save the day? That's not like you. You're usually such a self-serving asshole."

"Would've…done it…if it were you down here, too."

House knows that Chase can be selfless. He just wants to get a rise out of him because he knows that anger keeps him focused; that a strong emotion might help him to stay with it.

"What was the last thing you did before you left your house this morning?"

"Wh-what?"

It seems like such a ridiculous question but it'll establish memory or lack thereof. House has already noted down the look of disorientation; the confusion with which those blue-green eyes look at him at times as if he's never seen him before.

He finds himself relieved every time the recognition returns. It doesn't matter to Chase what side of House looms over him tonight. There are many sides to the man and he would cling to each one equally. Gentle or hard. Rough or smooth. Angel or devil, God or the Antichrist, soul or evil spirit, it doesn't matter. Tonight, Chase just wants his hand held, his breathing to be something meaningful rather than simply a death rattle.

"House," he whispers, as if he's remembered again.

"Come on, Chase, you know why I'm asking these questions. Just answer me so we can move on."

What did he do before he left his house this morning? He tries to think back. He tries to take himself back to that time but he finds it difficult. He clutches, grasps desperately for something familiar; for something that sounds right but there's nothing there.

There's nothing there.

"You don't know, do you?" House says, softly. "You don't remember."

"I'm sorry…"

He feels like he's done something wrong. He feels like a small child, having disappointed his father by forgetting the answer to the scientific query posed to him.

He wants to cry.

He feels like he's been dropped from such a great height that it's shattered him; that he's worthless to anybody, now that he can't answer simple questions.

"I'm sorry," he repeats, but he's nothing to be sorry about. Tears prick his eyes. That's too much for House. He touches Chase's shoulder because he sees, now, just how devastating it is for Chase to get something wrong; to not be able to answer something that's put to him.

He looks backwards, back at the hole from which he crawled and yells out loud that they don't have much time.

The kid's fading out…and he's not going to let him die in an unmarked open grave with only a careless bastard to hold his hand.

(*)

Her hair looks grey. She's aged twenty years in the past half hour. On a day she's supposed to be happy, gleeful and on top of the world she somehow finds herself beneath it.

Jeff told her their best bet was to amputate; release Chase without compromising the fragile structure of the building. Chase, himself, is a fragile structure. She knows that herself. Would she be compromising him by ordering House to go ahead with the removal of his limb?

"He's not listening," Jeff told her, quietly. "I've seen situations like this before. It's my job, ma'am. He needs to stop trying to play God and save the kid's life."

She knows it's true. Every fibre of her being aches for House; aches for his skewed sense of principle. As she crawls down this squalid little dungeon-hole she feels for him, too.

He doesn't want Chase to suffer like he does.

He doesn't want a young man who's lost so much already to lose a part of himself.

It's difficult for her to move, down here. She wonders how on Earth House pushed himself through these dusty boundaries with only one leg worthwhile but his determination knows no bounds, never has.

He knows no bounds.

Her heart stops when she finds them; House, with his back pressed against he unstable wall. Chase, trapped by his own sense of valour.

House looks wasted. Exhausted. Chase looks…lost. Young. The IV hangs from a rusty nail sticking out from fallen stone. His leg is straight, now, padded out with tight bandages and an inflatable immobiliser that's dirty already.

"How is he?" Cuddy whispers, and her voice indicates a certain culpability for his current predicament, as if it's her fault, somehow.

House allows it to stay in place.

He wonders if he's punishing her for the fact that she doesn't love him or the fact that she loves a man-child like Lucas who can never satisfy her in the way that he knows he could.

He stares at her.

"He's great. In fact, he's thinking of sending out for pizza and calling in the removal guys to bring all of his stuff down here. He likes the ambiance. He's thinking of moving in."

"House, I'm serious. This is serious."

"You think I don't know that?"

He rarely gets angry like this. Chase flinches but his eyes don't open.

When his father yelled the world would stop, would tremble. His mother cowered against the wall as he screamed in her face, demanding, accusing but never touching, never touching…

Young Chase would close his eyes tightly, so tightly, covers his ears with his tiny hands and pretends that he's somewhere else. Narnia, perhaps. He'd hide in his wardrobe hoping that one day a door would open and he would be led into a world of talking lions and magical, magical things.

The shouting was bad…but, what was worse was the silence that came after when his father left.

His mother wouldn't cower against the wall. She'd simply drink until she passed out.

Chase, living in a world of silence, longed for the shouting again…shouting that at least told him that the world was still alive; that it hadn't ceased in light of everything.

Cuddy doesn't cower. She doesn't tremble.

Her voice is soft but firm when she tells him "You have to amputate. You're going to kill him."

"He doesn't want that. Said he'd rather die. Thought I'd give him the choice I never had."

He makes it personal. Now, she flinches.

"Does he want to die down here? His head…House, you have to be reasonable. He could be bleeding into his brain. He could be…"

"…I can relieve the pressure. Buy him some time."

"He needs more than you can give him."

"He needs his body in one piece, Cuddy. Don't you think people have taken enough from him?"

She doesn't know what he means, hasn't been here. She hasn't heard a small boy's voice crying out for a father that never came, hasn't heard the unbridled stories of verbal abuse, of inferiority, of the agonising fear of being the disappointment he was always led to believe he would be…

She doesn't know of the wife that told him point-blank that she left him because he was broken; didn't think him valuable enough to stand by, to put back together…

She doesn't know.

Neither did House, until now.

"Too many people have given up on the poor bastard. I'm not going to be one of them."

She sighs.

She knew this would be difficult.

"There risk's too great, House. They've tried to find a solution but there is none. There's no way of removing that rod without risking a further collapse. It could kill anyone that's underneath it. He could die, House. He could die, and so could whoever else happens to be down here."

"And, that's certain?"

Again, she sighs.

"No, but…"

"So, it's not certain? There's a possibility that won't happen?"

"Certain enough that they won't risk their lives testing their calculations. This is the end of the road. There's no time to buy him, House. We have to get him out of here now."

It's Chase that has the last word. Words.

His eyes open.

He speaks so weakly he can barely be heard but his sentiment is lucid. Definite.

"Rather die," he whispers, chokes, "than lose my arm. He's right."

It's a stupid sentiment but he means it. He'd lose his life. His career. His career is his life, is all he has. Without it, he's nothing.

He'd have…nothing.

"Chase," Cuddy tries, "you're in a lot of pain. You're concussed. You have a head injury. You're confused. You don't know what you're saying."

"I know…exactly what I'm saying…Cuddy. It's my…my…r-right."

It's his choice. He has a right to choose.

House's eyes burn into Cuddy's when he provides his own solution.

"I'll do it myself. They say there's a risk."

"A huge risk…"

House doesn't smile but his eyes light up. "I like risks."

He'll risk his life, has done it before. He'll put himself in danger for the sake of a patient; his patient. If he dies trying then so be it.

"You're crazy. You'll kill yourself AND you'll kill him."

"Life fast," he says, "die young. Leave a beautiful corpse. If I die trying then at least I'll be remembered for that."

He looks up; looks up at the red metal embedded and trapped by the grey stone.

"All it takes is a delicate touch," he says, thoughtfully.

It's not something he's renowned for. He's no surgeon, after all.

He'll chip away at this stone as if it's bone; as if it's calcium build up within a weakened body and if it all falls down upon him….so be it.

So be it.

**PARTS 7-10**

"You need to go gently. Chip at it as if you're carving a face in stone, not as if you're trying to hack down a tree. Try to keep the balance right. It's important that you don't take off too much at any one time. Keep it steady. Keep it tight."

The disembodied voice floats from above and behind. House would liken it to the voice of God if it were not so thoroughly annoying.

"There's nothing worse than a back seat driver," Chase mutters quietly, trying his best to be still.

"Yeah, nothing worse than an annoying, gnat-like voice down your ear saying it's drugs, it's alcohol when you're trying to get a patient's background."

It's hard to tell whether or not the sound that Chase makes is a laugh or a protest. His speech deteriorated around fifteen minutes ago, through no fault of his own. With the possibility of growing pressure in his brain House was forced to sedate him, not enough to put him to sleep but enough to keep him dull, limp and careless. He was too stressed, too upset. He was moving around too much and with no way of monitoring the ICP it was best just to keep him calm. Every so often he allows his glazed eyes to look up at House's 'handiwork' but he's not afraid. Not any more. He's effectively detached from the situation, watching from behind screens. It's as if this is happening to somebody else.

House taps the rock elegantly, delicately. The stone crumbles but doesn't threaten to fall.

"Are you feeling anything? Pain? Pins and needles?" The metal must be vibrating through him. House can't imagine how uncomfortable it must feel.

"Can't feel anything," Chase replies. His words fall into each other, boyishly drunk. "Good drugs."

"Yeah, don't get used to them."

He seems more lucid since the medication was administered. House has noticed how he refuses to look at his arm as if to ignore it is to not feel it. The metal that impales him is pressing on a nerve. The truth is, the limb doesn't belong to him in this moment. It doesn't feel a part of him.

"Remember to just…not move. I know it's hard for you. If your hands aren't twisting your hair your fingers are twisting pencils in your mouth."

"…oral fixation…"

"Too much information, Chase. I'm your boss, not your lover."

"Out of your league."

"Oh, I forgot. Don't worry, you're not my type. I like my blondes to have a bit more up front, if you know what I mean."

It's a nice little exchange. Quippy. Light-hearted. They both need that.

The voice from above returns. It's muffled. Loud, but fuzzy, as if the owner of that deep, rumbling voice is speaking from beneath blankets.

"Remember, Dr House. Don't use the drill unless you have to. It'll shake the whole foundations."

"I'm not a complete moron," he yells back. "If you've got something to say at least make it useful."

"We're trying to provide guidance if you insist on going through with this."

"I don't need you stating the obvious. You're ruining my concentration."

He feels a vibration from his own raised voice. Trembles. Quakes. Seizures in the building. Cuddy had mentioned seizures as a possible life-threatening danger. With the need for a steady hand and the least amount of movement in the supporting beam as possible then the need for Chase to be still was imperative. The sedative reduced the risk of seizure, the lowering of his blood pressure perhaps reducing the build up inside of his skull. So far there'd been no sign of impending fits but House isn't stupid; knows the unpredictability of head injury.

He's glad that Chase seems relatively stable but the delicacy of the 'operation' he's performing, at present, is beginning to wear him down. There is sweat dripping down his forehead. The dust is settling where his skin is clammy. He looks filthy. Feels filthier. He doesn't know if it's the heat or the stress but he can't see straight.

"You okay?" Chase asks, somehow sensing the discomfort.

"I'm fine. Worry about yourself," House replies, wondering if the feeling is that of guilt when he realises that Chase is concerned about ihim/i.

How wrong could his opinion of his own employee be?

It's the lack of concentration that makes him lose it momentarily, makes him hammer a little too hard. He knew the danger. He knew the risk. It seems cruel when the debris lands on Chase, misses House completely. It's not enough to hurt him but it's enough to shock him. House freezes. Panics. This is too much. This is too serious.

He wonders if this is beyond even him.

He hears rumbling at ground level, knows they're up there planning his funeral, knows Cuddy's wringing her hands and telling the world how she told him this would happen.

"Fuck," he says, rarely swears like that, rarely says such things but then as soon as the ceiling began to fall it ceases.

Still stable.

Still holding.

Mirroring Chase, in a lot of ways…

House breathes. Breathes deep. His leg aches and his head hurts and his muscles ache with the tension but they're alive.

They're both alive.

"It's stopped. Chase, listen to me. You're okay."

Chase whimpers, cries out. House realises how much he wants to live; how terrified he is of this fragile grip on life. He's heavy with drugs but still scared out of his mind, previous detachment gone when he feels his mortality wearing so thin.

He looks…desperate.

"Please," he whispers, under his breath, "Please, God, don't let it fall."

Please, God, help us. Save us.

It helps, somehow, this uttering of urgency, this pleading, aching, begging pulse that runs through Chase, that's omitted from his every slurred, whispered word.

There's so much life in him, even this close to death.

Look at him now, House thinks. He's just a boy.

"It's not time for God yet, Chase," he says, "at least give me a chance before you start turning to the big guy."

"Scared," Chase admits, letting go of all his bravado and bleeding out those words like a raw wound. "Scared of…d-death. Scared I'll go to Hell for what I did."

House takes a deep breath. He pulls that hammer back into his hands and holds it there tightly.

Is he that haunted, House thinks? Is he that damaged?

The pressure is tight in his chest. Firm. Hard.

He always worked better under pressure…

"Don't worry about that yet. That's not going to happen."

He'll give him many more years to atone for his perceived sins. He'll play God, here and now, because it's in his power to do so.

He bites his lip. He fixes his eyes in concentration.

He looks for weak point in the tumour; a good place to resume.

Part 8

After awhile Chase calms down. It's as if he can see the end; as if he has suddenly realised that House is with him and that House will save him. House will clutch him to his chest. House will set him free.

He becomes quiet and contemplative when focused, flighty and 'open' when not.

House learns a lot about the cogs and mechanisms that make up Robert Chase when those inhibitions desert him completely and for a full ten minute period he simply talks, talks about anything, talks about nothing, fills himself out into a three-dimensional character that's so much more than the wan, agreeable 'pretty boy' that only interested House when he was breaking down.

He learns that Chase played the violin in an orchestra at school; how he has his old friend tucked away underneath the floorboards of his bed at home because he never wanted his wife to share that part of him; because he wanted that little piece of art to be 'just his'.

He learns that Chase likes to cook, how 'Ally' used to love his oven-baked lasagne, how he'd often surprise her with candlelit meals for no reason other than that it was Tuesday. He works late on Tuesdays now because it kills him returning to the empty shell of his marriage; hurts him to know that she's somewhere else whilst he's still lost and confused and wondering whether that time spent on lockdown recently meant more to him than it did to her. He forgot her name during the story, twice referring to her as 'Anne' but House chose not to pull him up on it.

He just continues to chip away as Chase chips away at him, this forced intimacy both suffocating and liberating at once.

House listens. Takes everything but gives nothing. House feels he has nothing to give, nothing to offer this boy that would make him feel anything less than indifferent to him.

"Sorry," Chase murmurs, "M'rambling…"

"You're keeping me awake," House replies because he doesn't want Chase to stop. "I like you better when you're not so boring…"

His words are inaudible at times, so weak was his voice. House makes a mental note of all the times Chase cannot find words, names, cannot string a proper sentence together but mostly he just listens; listens to the unrestrained ramblings of a possibly-dying man and for once Chase is not a puzzle to him.

Chase is not a pawn to be poked and prodded and moved at will.

He sighs.

"Wanted to be a teacher. Or a musician. I only came into this because of my Dad," he says, softly. "I only ever wanted him to see that I'd become something in spite of him, not because of him."

"Your dad was an asshole."

"Yeah," Chase whispers, "but, I loved him."

It's poignant. It's provoking. It's jarring. It's a young man admitting so openly that he still loves a father that never loved him back; that the line between love and hatred was so thin and so ill defined that he never quite managed to breach it.

"You crave love," House says. "You're needy."

"Yeah. But, aren't you?"

It's a breakthrough, in a lot of ways, a break through in precisely the moment that House breaks through. The space around that beam is clear and the ceiling, the rock, the stone…it hasn't moved.

Chase blinks slowly. Carefully.

He smiles sadly. They say that a person who feels close to death often thinks of those that have gone before.

"I wonder if he loved me at all."

For a second, for a tiny second, House thinks that this could be it. This could be the end or it could be the beginning and he's torn; torn between letting this boy die without his father's love or letting him pass on underneath an illusion.

He knows the human thing would be to tell Chase that his father loved him; that he was proud of him, in his own quiet way. The human thing would be to tell him that Daddy just didn't know how to express himself and that Chase was the apple of his eye.

Even now, House can't bring himself to lie. Again, there's the cruelty of humanity and, though House is well aware of the old adage that 'everybody lies' he simply can't bring himself to.

"Your father was an asshole," he repeats, "and you'll live a better life without him."

It's like ripping a band-aid, pulling it clean from the skin and leaving behind a gasp and a sharp pain but nothing lingering.

Chase becomes quiet.

House almost feels guilty for that.

"I'm through," he tells Chase, hoping above all things that he's still 'with' him. "The moment of truth."

"The sky hasn't fallen."

"No. Not yet."

House knows that the minute he has Chase lean forward could be the minute it all falls down. He knows the second he has the boy emerge from this restrained position could be his own last moments on Earth.

"Is there anything you want to say?" House asks, just in case, and the only thing Chase says is "I trust you."

It hurts, a little, hearing those words. It hurts in the same way that love hurts, deep in the chest, riling, teasing because love is expectation and responsibility and it's painful and it bleeds so fully.

House nods.

"I need you to lean forward slowly. I'll try to support the metal as much as I can. If it's pressing on a nerve then moving might release it. I won't lie to you, Chase. This could end badly."

"I'm ready. Are you?"

He's ready. There's a thick wooden plank that House will try to replace the beam with once Chase is free; something to provide stability. Something to bear the weight.

He looks at Chase and thinks that nobody could replace him.

"After three. One. Two. Three."

House stares death in the face. They say a man's whole life flashes before him in moments such as these but all he sees is Chase, no time for himself, no thought for anything other than what he needs to do.

He stares into the abyss and he sees only life and youth.

They roll forward and the earthquake doesn't happen. Heaven doesn't tumble down upon them. Chase howls with the pain of movement, pressure in his ribs, his head, his arm, his leg. The beam remains in place because it might be the only thing that's keeping him from bleeding to death and as he curls over onto himself House has to wrench himself around to prod up that thick, wooden plank like a prosthetic replacing an amputated limb and he's thankful, thankful in this moment that it's a metaphorical limb and not his intensivist's.

"Stay still," he warns, "I don't want you going into shock."

Chase's teeth shatter as if he's cold but it's nerves, raw and exposed and it's only now, only in this moment of adrenaline-provoked madness that House notices how his own pulse is like a throbbing drum in his temples; how his own hands are shaking as if the Earth is turning and trembling.

He crouches down next to Chase and he places his hand on the back of his neck.

"You still with me?" he asks. Chase tries to catch his breath, tries to focus his thoughts. He tries to move past the massive empty space in his head as he says "Yeah."

Now that he's free House can't help but focus on how critical his condition most likely is and in the back of his mind there are so many thoughts, so many thoughts that he wishes weren't there but which spur him into action. He has to move fast. There isn't much time. The hard part is over…but, there are always aftershocks. They might remove the tumour but there's always a risk of infection that leaves the body dead as a doornail even though they've destroyed the root of its evil.

"We need to get you onto the stretcher," House says, "then, those cowards up there can actually do their job."

His legs are weak but his arms are strong. Chase isn't big. At times he borders on slight depending on his mood and habits; depending on his level of stress. Stress makes him more beautiful, it seems, cuts the marble of his cheekbones higher, the curve of his shoulder blades more defined. He leans forward, hindered by metal.

He calls himself part-man part-robot and when he laughs it makes his ribs hurt.

"Come on," House warns, "your right leg's fucked but I'm living proof that people can still raise Hell with one leg."

"One arm," Chase chokes, by way of counter-argument, but he does try to manoeuvre himself the best that he can even as disabled as he is. House lowers him down onto the stretcher that awaits. He covers him with a dirty blanket and for a moment he wonders if this is what it might've been like to have had a son, a child, a little boy whose legs he would cover at night, whose comfort he would ensure by fluffing pillows and reading bedtime stories.

This is no fairytale, though. Instead of kissing Chase's forehead and telling him to go to sleep he warns him not to.

"No passing out, now. No giving in."

Because it's so easy to give in once the danger has seemingly passed. It's so easy to become complacent.

"If you so much as drop off I'll make it Hell for you."

"Okay, okay…"

His words are gritted and pained but he's smiling. God, he's smiling.

"A little help down here?" House calls up, knowing full well that a man of his own much-maligned disability can't do this alone.

They descend, knowing he's carried out the hard part. It's hard not to resent them for that.

As they emerge from the tunnel Chase comments upon the light he sees shining up ahead. He tells him there's no God up there; that the euphemism for death isn't lost upon him. Chase looks worse up here. His skin is pallid, like tapestry paper. The swelling on his head shines underneath the spotlight where the skin is pulled tight.

House stares at Cuddy when he sees her tear-stained face; her overwhelming sorrow and sadness and love, if that's the word. He looks her right in the eye and asks "Did I make the Earth move for you for once?"

He doesn't want to know who called Cameron; who asked her to attend upon her 'dying' soon-to-be ex-husband like some guardian angel from the past but she's there taking centre-stage. She's there in her long black coat and her knitted gloves with her blond hair dancing around her like a halo. He looks at her. Glares at her. She has tears in her eyes and House thinks she's nothing more than a little girl dressed in adult's body.

He's thankful that Chase seems out of it, now that the oxygen mask has been placed over his face, because the last thing he needs is a confusing reunion with a woman who never wanted to put him back together again when he was as fragile as that fallen building behind them.

"Chase," she calls out, but House's eyes are enough to hold her back. It's painful. It's physical. His stare, it's implicitly threatening and she finds herself caught in her tracks. He knows Chase will be attractive to her, now; knows that he won't be able to resist her Siren's song as she cries at his bedside, strokes his head and kisses his pain away.

He says but two words to the weeping widow.

"Stay away."

"I don't want him to be alone," she chokes, her voice thick with emotion, but House's blue eyes burn like the centre of a flame when he reminds her that he's been alone for months so what difference would it make?

"You only want him now that he's broken," House says, bitterly. "The irony is, he's been broken for months. You just didn't care to stick around to help him through that. I won't let you use him, now, just so you can feel good about yourself."

His words cut deep.

"I care about him," she whispers, but her voice is lost in the moment.

"We're ready," the medics say, finally, interrupting the moment before the tension created a further explosion or collapse.

House doesn't know whether or not it's superiority, perhaps victory he feels when Chase's eyes move from Cameron to House himself and instead of calling for the woman he loves to stay with him he calls for his boss.

Part 9

The ambulance feels tight. Claustrophobic. Insular, almost.

It's white and sterile and clinical and clean but it doesn't feel much better than the 'cave' did, not really, because the air in here is still stuffy and House still feels like he's buried alive. He should be used to enclosed spaces after the past few hours of his life but at this moment in time he feels like he wants to run to the centre of an open field and just stand there for awhile, arms outstretched, breathing in air that isn't full of debris and staring up at a sky that isn't made of grey stone.

He wants to feel the air on his face. He wants to become a living cliché for a few moments in time.

"How d'you get out?" he's asked, but what can he say but "Determination. Perseverance."

He looks down at his hands thinking of how he clawed his way out of that place and wonders if it makes him any more of a man, any more of a human being, the fact that he dug a man out from the centre of the Earth when the rest of the world had practically given up on him.

"You're brave," the crew tell him. "You wouldn't have caught me down there."

"Selfless guys," House responds, but there's no malice in his voice.

The paramedics gave him the once over at the scene. They shone lights into his eyes, fixed on Cuddy yet not really seeing her. They took his BP. He shrugged them off forcefully because he knows his own body and he's 'together' enough to know there's nothing wrong with him.

It took five minutes to get Chase into the ambulance; to position him in such a way that he was not in pain and that his circulation was not compromised. He looked terrified as they strapped him down, as if he were frightened of what they'd do to him whilst he was sedated and restrained; helpless, in effect.

House promises to 'protect' him with the faux valour of Knight but it makes Chase feel safer, at least.

He reels off symptoms as they apply wires to Chase's chest; as they hook him up to monitors House could've done with down there in the Hell-hole they've just returned from.

When they ask Chase a question he looks frightened and lost, tries to curl into House, to disappear into the man he feels will shield him.

"He's a little confused, as I'm sure you can imagine," he explains. "A little knock to the head and all of a sudden he's all clingy and whiny…"

"Understandable, considering what he's been through."

"Oh, that was nothing. He could've lost an arm and had a hole drilled in his head. He got off lightly."

House rolls his eyes sardonically but there's no seriousness in his harshness. He's just trying to keep Chase calm.

The medic is trained to keep patients calm.

"It's a good job it was me on call. If I were in his shoes I wouldn't want a stranger

working on me. Nothing more comforting than a familiar face when your head's up in the clouds."

"You know the Brit?"

A look of confusion not too dissimilar to Chase's.

"I thought he was Australian…"

The medic's name is Eddie. Chase knows him. He's had dinner with him on three occasions because he attended a seminar last Spring that Eddie was a part of. Chase did a couple of lectures because intensive care is often a huge part in the patient's journey and it's useful to do some prep work whilst they're in the back of the ambulance. Eddie was intelligent and intuitive. Curious. Eager to learn. Chase liked Eddie. Cameron liked Eddie's wife, Shanice.

That was then, though, and this is now. Eddie tries to engage Chase whilst he's adjusting the mask on his face but the look he receives in response disturbs him. Chase looks…timid. Frightened, almost. There's no recognition.

He looks nervous as his eyes flicker between Eddie and House as if he's searching for protection. Reassurance.

"Prosopagnosia," House explains. "Difficulty in recognising faces. I've known him for years and he's been sporadically forgetting mine, too. Would you believe that?"

"What does that mean?" Eddie asks. His accent has always grated on House's nerves, so very New York, so very…lower class. He doesn't notice it now. All he notices is Chase's alarmed expression as it tries to force its way through the mask that the sedative has left him beneath.

"It means that he's most likely got pressure on his temporal lobe. He's been having trouble understanding simple words, too. Wernicke's Aphasia. It's another problem with damage to that area. His memory is…unstable at best. Chase is like an elephant. He never forgets. It's why you can never borrow money off him. The kid will probably still be holding grudges when he's seventy. Now? He can't even remember his own mother's name."

Hardly a memorable woman, but still.

He blinks. He forces himself to comply with his own head.

He finds the name from somewhere, conjured up by sheer determination that leaves him red faced and gasping for breath.

"Susan," Chase manages, his voice muffled by plastic and forced air. "My mum's name was Susan."

"And, your Dad's?"

That's too much to ask.

Everybody knows Chase's father's name. The look on his own face indicates the fact that he doesn't.

House nods his head as if he's won.

"Point proven."

Chase closes his eyes, defeated, dejected. If his hands were not occupied by needles and compromised nerves he might ball them up into fists of frustration. Instead he just tries to focus on his breathing; tries to get his mind away from the fact he can barely see any more, other than these dancing pink and blue butterflies that spread across his vision every time he moves his eyes.

They're pretty, at least. Distracting.

"Do you remember my name?" House asks. "Yours?"

The response is not forthcoming. The silence is…telling.

"Didn't think so."

House tells Chase he's too damaged to play clever at the minute and the patient doesn't deny it. He just looks a little sad, a little lost and far, far too young to be a doctor.

It's obvious he's tired. It's obvious that the combination of stress and medication and injury are taking their toll on him and now that he's in some kind of supportive environment House feels that he can finally let go; cut the apron strings a little.

He can reel out the leash just that tiny bit and finally give Chase a bit of rest.

"You're tired."

"So tired…"

"You need sleep."

A sound like a whimper. Delicate. Frail. "Please…"

Then quiet. House feels a pain in his stomach and he wonders if it's sympathy. Then he wipes it away, not allowing himself to feel that because it's such an alien emotion and one he cannot deal with right now.

It's not hard to sense Chase's need, though, and his vulnerability is plain to see.

"Be good, now," House says, as he touches that injured head. "Don't cause any trouble, Chase. Daddy needs some rest, too."

His voice is sarcastic but the words, they're not completely far from the truth. Chase just lies there, strapped down to a gurney lingering in a world where nothing is easy any more; where nothing is clear.

He feels he's been given permission to let go, though, and it helps.

It helps, a little, that he's granted authority to stop trying so hard.

House leans back and rests his head against the window. He closes his eyes, wondering how on Earth he didn't see this coming when he got out of bed this morning. He's normally so intuitive, can 'sense' when something bad's coming but he had no inkling. There were no moths flapping around in his stomach; no nestling worms biting through his intestines.

He felt…calm.

Now, he just feels tired, so tired, as though he's been awake for days, as though he hasn't had a moment's rest in as long as he can remember. He knows it's the physiological effects of that increase in adrenaline backing off, giving him an almost bipolar 'low' but still, it exhausts him and he allows himself a moment to simply…reflect.

He only rests for a second. Just a second; a split moment in time.

For that moment there is silence and he's peaceful. He rests within the moment, gathers it up and treasures it, relishes it, appreciates it. He ripples with the movement of the vehicle, moves and sways as it bends and brakes. His body is liquid, smooth and relaxed, and he drifts.

For just a second, he drifts away…but, Heaven can only last a moment for the Atheist before it's snatched away, stolen from him because he didn't believe.

The sound of shrieking alarms provides the wake up call that he didn't need and sends his body into overdrive yet again. It's loud. It's shrill. Eddie springs to action without so much as a flinch but House is fast too, fast when he needs to be, alert when it's necessary.

He almost curses Chase for not doing as he's told but then he sees the devastating effect this evening is having on the boy and the sentiment dies in his arms.

"He's seizing," Eddie yells, as if that much isn't obvious.

The fragile body jerks with a force it shouldn't be capable of. The veins in Chase's neck stand out against the skin, his temples throbbing with the unbelievable strength of the electrical storm that wreaks havoc upon him like lightning pummelling the flimsy branches of a newborn tree. His body, held to the gurney with black straps, strains against them. They'll mark him. They'll leave bruises like lashes over his arms and chest.

His eyes are wide open but white, no colour, no pupil, no iris, just red; red where white should be and he's bleeding out of his ear.

House calls out his name; calls out his name as the alarms scream out "stop" and "help" and "ACT!"

For a second House feels helpless. Useless, as the first injection does nothing. Powerless, as the second does little to calm these raging muscles, as the monitors screech and shout and scream and deafen and as God. Looks. Away.

House hasn't prayed since he was eleven years old but he finds himself pleading for resolution as this act plays out before him, begging for some divine intervention because he can't lose him now. Not here. Not like this.

Not after all that's gone before.

(*)

The seizure lasts four minutes.

With the amount of drugs House had Eddie pump into Chase he'll be practically comatose, if he isn't already. By the time his body stills he's unconscious. Barely breathing.

His chest rises and falls with a raggedness that cannot be sustained, not with his body this weak and his brain this taxed.

"It's over," Eddie pants, the sweat dripping into his eyes and his whole body a mess of tangled muscles and tension.

For now, it's over, but the patient is weary and spent and his 'guardian' is close to breaking point.

"Jesus Christ," House says, and his tone suggests he's angry with the patient, something which Eddie simply cannot understand.

He cannot understand the complex relationship this man has with his 'fellows'.

Chase hates to depend upon anyone but House can see he can't do it alone, any more, that this is too much work for him to manage by himself. He's crashed, and there's nothing House can do but try to keep him alive for the remaining six minutes of the journey.

He's kept him alive for this long but now it just seems…out of his hands.

"Just relax," he says, as he tilts Chase's head back. "Try not to start breakdancing again. It isn't cool."

Isn't cool but terrifying, and House isn't a man that scares easily.

There's no resistance when he's intubated. His level of consciousness isn't enough for the gag reflex to kick in. House wonders whether he truly is unconscious or simply too exhausted to respond.

The seizure threw him around like a ragdoll. His body remains that pliable now that the tension has ebbed away.

"There. All done."

He doesn't look human like this, with a tube coming out of his mouth and a thick metal bar entering and exiting his body as if it's a part of him. House tapes the same tube to the side of Chase's face so gently, stroking a finger along his cheekbone as he does so. Again, it's a comforting gesture masked as medical intervention. Again, he can't afford to be 'open' about his concern.

He whispers softly to Chase, so softly that the ambulance crew cannot hear because these words are not meant for them. House wonders if they're even meant for him.

Somewhere, somewhere inside, Chase hears.

Hears House, cold House, rigid House, careless House telling him "Hold on," telling him "we're almost there" as he pumps air into his lungs; as he breathes for him, speaks for him, lives for him.

He's happy, then. Happy to succumb to the darkness because he knows he won't be alone in it.

He's happy to give in because he knows that House is there to hold him above the water; to stop him from drowning or falling beneath.

He's never had that faith in any one before.

He's never had the trust to simply let go.

PART 10

Wilson has always been tolerant. He's an elastic band that never snaps. You can push it, pull it, twist it, manipulate it and it will never break, will never tear and, most importantly to House, will never leave.

He's the doormat that House has walked over for years but he's the only doormat House would ever want. He's soft beneath his feet. He doesn't gristle. He doesn't complain. There's 'give' in Wilson, always has been, and though House is prone to 'take' he only takes what Wilson can afford to hand over. He's sensitive, but Wilson is a wolf in sheep's clothing. He's one of the strongest men that House has ever met.

They're good friends. To those on the outside it seems one-sided but House offers Wilson more than anyone could ever imagine, bounces off him, judges him when he needs to be judged and calls him out when he needs that, too.

House thinks that Wilson is pathetic…but, that's fine, because Wilson thinks that House is mentally deficient and it works, somehow.

They work.

"You shouldn't still be here," Wilson says. "It's two in the morning."

"If I wasn't here I'd be at a bar somewhere chasing down Vicodin with vodka and absinthe. Would you prefer that?"

"No, but…"

"But nothing. Either sit down or shut up. Better still, go away. Haven't you got a girlfriend to pleasure? I'm sure she won't appreciate being left home alone to her own devices. She might, God forbid, leave the toilet seat down if she's left alone."

He sighs. He rubs his head with his temples because he's tired but he knows he'll never sleep. The day has left him exhausted…but he can't leave it, now.

"Toddle off home, Wilson. I don't need you here."

The answer is firm. Fair. There's no give in it. House needs that, sometimes, a person with no give, a person that won't let up.

"No."

Wilson is one of the only men who will stand up to and defy House; one of the only men that House would take it from. He doesn't have many friends, but at a push he might provide Wilson with that title; that label.

Wilson has always been tolerant…but, he can't tolerate this. He won't. He won't sit back and watch House wrap himself up in this obsession, this compulsion, this hopeless quest for something that Wilson will never understand.

At least…he won't let him do it alone.

He's been sat on the 'observation deck' for two hours. There are two empty cups of coffee at his feet. There is an endless supply of silence around him. He hasn't eaten. He hasn't showered, has snapped at anyone who has tried to get near as if this were his place, his territory and as if they were not welcome within in. He's pissed in every corner, metaphorically, has laid claim to the young man on that operating table because he saved him, because he dragged him out of that place and in a way that makes him his.

He watched alone.

He watched alone as Foreman ran the clippers along Chase's skull, watched as the fine blond hair fell to the ground, so carefully procured in recent weeks and now so ruined. It lay scattered, a thin layer of sand around blue-plastic feet.

He looked like a baby bird. Newborn and vulnerable.

When they'd taken the scalpel to his shaven skin and peeled it back he'd forced himself to stay with it, watch as they scoured that horse-shoe shape into his head that will scar beneath his hairline, watched as Chase didn't move; looked dead already. For a split second he thought he'd noticed Foreman's hands trembling but perhaps that was House's tired eyes.

The only words Foreman has offered in his direction have been "House, go home."

"Whatever for?" he'd replied. "There's nothing on TV."

The grains of Earth still cling to his skin, the remnants of Chase's blood still nestled beneath his fingernails. When Wilson places a hand on his shoulder it feels dirty and dry, as if it's turning to ashes and dust before his eyes.

"I told people to stay away," House warns, but he doesn't push. "What makes you think I'll let you in?"

Wilson analyses the tone of his voice and it's accepting. Almost.

He doesn't lean into Wilson's touch but he doesn't push it away, either.

"You could at least clean yourself up," he says, "if you must be here."

"Again, I ask, what for? I'm not performing surgery. I'm watching it."

A pause. A beat. He sounds…wracked. Ravaged.

"I'll shower when it's over."

"It's a delicate operation. Foreman said it could be hours. The fracture, it was…messy. He wants to make sure he gets all of the bone before he closes up."

Depressed fracture. Fragmented. The shards of glass Chase felt were actually shards of skull. The damage is located where House anticipated it would be. Temporal lobe. It's too soon to tell how bad. Fragments of skull had penetrated the tenderness of his brain tissue and are now carefully pulled away by a man he's laughed with, joked with, fought with.

Foreman wanted to do the surgery.

House thought that Chase would've wanted that.

He knows the first 72 hours after surgery are critical. He'll be kept sedated. Comatose. Ventilated, to allow his body to concentrate only on gluing itself back together. It'll only be when he wakes up that they'll be able to see what remains of the Robert Chase they knew; whether he'll be changed substantially, whether he'll be a different person entirely.

House knows the effects of temporal lobe injury; knows that Chase could suffer from any number of them or none at all. He knows that his memory could be impaired, short and long term, that his organisational skills may be compromised. Both of these symptoms would make his job impossible. Difficulty in identification and categorisation would ruin him as a diagnostician.

"He didn't want to lose the arm because he'd risk his job as a surgeon," House explains. "It might be all over anyway."

"He's a strong-willed guy, House. If anyone can fight back, it's him."

"Oh, yeah? And, who'll push him but me? If it hasn't escaped your attention nobody gives a fuck about him. Do you see any distant family here to cry for him? Where's his wife?"

"Ex-wife, and she's not here because you threatened her off. She's downstairs, House. She's too scared to come anywhere near."

"Good."

The word is spoken bitterly. Wilson wonders just what was said down there in that cavernous place to make House so anti-Cameron; to make her suffer the way he has.

His hand forms a fist. The urge to punch and shatter the glass in front of him is strong, so strong, because even if they save his life they might end it. He'll need further surgery once he's stable on his arm, on his leg. House concludes he'll be spending a lot of time up behind this window in coming days but knows it's a damn site better than spending his time wondering who, if anyone, would turn up to the poor kid's funeral.

"It'll take a long time for him to recover but he will recover."

"You don't know that. What are you, Mystic Meg?"

"I'm your friend. I'm his friend. We won't let him go through this alone. We'll push him when he needs pushing. We'll back off when he needs that, too. I know you, House. You don't give up on a challenge. You get these…obsessions. You won't let him sit back and take this."

He sighs.

"God knows, how many times you've pushed me when I just wanted to curl up and give in."

He feels Wilson sitting down beside him but he doesn't turn to look. He doesn't reiterate his 'need' to be alone because at this moment in time it kind of feels good to have someone near him.

He turns his head but doesn't look Wilson in the eye. He looks past him, gathers him up in his peripheral vision.

He doesn't want to portray his own need.

"His vitals look good," Wilson acknowledges, as he eyes the young man sadly, so full of life only a few weeks ago as he sang with the man that saved him; with the other man that attempts to save him now in a sterile, clinical room.

He smiles a little. "He's so particular about his hair."

"His soft, luxuriant hair," House mocks, channelling Cameron's voice.

Wilson sounds serious, now. A little scared. "He looks about twelve."

"He is about twelve. Or five. I'm surprised he doesn't still wear nappies, as the English call them."

He sighs, hard done by - pretends to be the ever-suffering father who just can't get his kid to stop disobeying him.

"I don't know how many times I've warned him about putting things in his mouth. Pens. Rulers. Plastic wrappers. I thought kids grew out of those habits? He'll be chewing on that ET tube the minute he wakes up. Might even cry when we take it out. We might have to give him a pacifier. Or, sorry, a dummy."

"Oh, I'm sure you'll give something him to suck on," Wilson says, then immediately chokes on his own words when House stares at him incredulously.

"Wilson!"

"I-I don't mean like, like that…I mean…"

He flushes furiously. The colour paints those delicate, Jewish cheekbones as he writhes in his own misplaced words. It breaks the mood, somehow. House smiles, smiles for the first time in what feels like a long, long while as he places a hand on Wilson's leg and pats it, fraternally.

"You always know what to say, Jimmy," he says, in mock accusation. "You always know how to lower the tone. You should be ashamed of yourself. The kid might die."

"I know, I know, I just…"

The flush depends. It's furious, spreads across his face like a blanket of heat-based humiliation as he buries his face in his hands.

"God, I should never, ever speak."

"Why not? You're a world of comedy in any event. I should hire you out for children's parties. We'd make a fortune."

"It's good to know that my shame is your gain, House."

For a fragment in time they're just Wilson and House again, sat side by side making a mockery of the world.

For one little moment they're just…here, with no subtext, no background, no dire, deathly situation.

House laughs. Wilson laughs too.

Sometimes, moments like this need a bit of relief, even if it's only fleeting. Even if it doesn't last for long.

**Part 11 **

The surgery ends at 4am. House remains present whilst Chase is sewn up and whilst stark white bandages are wrapped around his broken head. The drainage tube that's kept in place to spit blood away from the injury is grotesque but the shell, the body, it's still Chase's.

"You did good," Foreman says, as he places a hand gently on the side of his patient's face. "You did good, man."

He feels like he's been watched from above but it wasn't God. It was House.

Foreman looks up though the obs deck window. His face is strained. Exhausted. Pale, if it could ever be pale. Five hours of surgery will do that to a person, will leave them drained, emotionally and physically. He can feel a stress headache building in his temples; has to wonder whether or not it's 'sympathy pain' for the man he just attempted to put back together.

Foreman hopes he's kept the seams neat; that he's left Chase with at least some semblance of normality.

House presses the intercom button and asks "What's the verdict, Doctor Foreman?" and whilst Foreman can see that he's attempting to remain light-hearted he's shocked at the sound of the tattered voice.

He attempts a thumbs up but the sentiment doesn't reach his eyes. Whilst his actions suggest a good result his face reflects the worry that these forthcoming days will bring, the unpredictability that follows this kind of operation.

"You should go home, House. We're taking him to recovery. You know he's off-limits until we move him to the ICU."

Foreman knows that Chase is terrified of the thought of being a patient in his own comfort zone. He's said it time and time again, that ICU is a torture chamber and that the things done to patients in the name of curing them are incredibly cruel.

It's hard being a doctor, knowing what torments one looks forward to when they walk the shoes of those on the other side.

(*)

It's only now that the immediate danger has passed that House knows he's crashing, too. His whole body becomes a mass of jagged nerve endings, his every waking muscle giving in on him as he falls into the seat he's dragged himself out of.

He knows the expression bone-tired and he's certainly that. The ache settles in his tibia, his fibula, in his spine, in his clavicles. His arms hang limp at his sides and his head begins to swim with the need for sleep.

Foreman was correct when he said "there's nothing you can do, now," was correct when he established the fact that until he's settled in his 'new' room tomorrow he will be out of bounds.

If he were not so tired the words would've been like telling a four year old "don't touch that" or warning a person "don't look down." Being told he could not be somewhere would've made House want to be there all the more but he's burning out, he can feel it, and Chase needs him alert and in focus.

They're 'packing him up,' now. They're taking him away. His body is a mass of tubing and medical equipment but he's in there somewhere. It's funny how House can only 'see' him now when he never 'saw' him before, even when he's barely visible.

It's daunting, the feeling that's built up inside of House these past hours. It presses hard on his chest.

It almost hurts.

He places a hand on the glass as Chase is wheeled away and when he's certain that nobody's looking he whispers the words "Sleep well."

(*)

She looks small and fragile, her arms wrapped around her body and the remnants of dried tears so prevalent on her face.

Her mascara has ran across her face and she's paler than House remembers. The mask she wears is one of devastation. House wants to apologise to her and tell her that Chase isn't dead yet, that the grieving widow look has been born before its time but even he's not that cruel.

She stands immediately as if expecting something. House doesn't know what that 'something' is but he's not going to give her what she wants.

Chase's voice, so soft, so quiet, echoing in his ears with such delicacy and such graceful sadness as he told him "All I wanted was for her to tell me that everything would be alright. I wasn't asking for much. I'd have done the same for her."

House can see she's frightened to approach him, as if the years she knew him never happened and the man before her is a a hostile stranger. Her steps are tentative. Her legs are shaking as if the stress of holding her upright is too much for them to handle.

"How is he?" she asks. Her voice is low, as shaky as her legs. It doesn't sound like her voice and, to House, she doesn't look like Cameron.

He wonders who this stand-in woman is and what happened to the girl he once knew?

Did she die along with that dictator?

"She told me you'd broken me and that she couldn't be around me any more. Why wouldn't she fix me? Was I not worthy enough to be fixed? I loved her. I really thought she loved me, too, but now I'm not so sure."

He knows he's being intentionally cruel when he walks straight past her; when the words "Go home" leave his mouth only when he's left her behind.

He doesn't want to see her tears. He doesn't want to look at her sad, pathetic little face and wonder whether she had more sadness for her other husband. He doesn't want to look into her eyes and wonder if Chase had been searching for this kind of emotion in her face when he was pleading with her not to leave him to deal with his demons alone.

"House."

She screams his name in hysterical frustration; tells him he has no right to treat her this way. That man is her husband until the paperwork is complete and she has rights.

"I have rights…"

That pisses him off. Those words, they leave a sour taste in House's mouth and he's not going to let it go. He looks her right in the eye and lets her know that he means every word that he says.

"You lost your rights the minute you left him, Cameron. Is puppy more appealing now that he's got a broken leg?"

"No, I – "

"Grow up."

She bites her lip desperately. House has always wondered whether Cameron's 'little girl' routine is manipulative; cultured from the thought of not getting her own way. He's always been cynical of her apparent innocence; her Little Miss Muffett vulnerability.

He's cynical of it now when she whispers her heartbroken plea.

"Why won't you let me near?"

House refuses to be drawn in. His mind is one-track.

Chase doesn't need her screwing with his head. It's screwed up enough as it is.

"Because I have to think of what's best for the patients of this hospital and he's better off without you. Now, go home."

He knows she won't. He knows she'll pull the 'Next of Kin' card and when he returns she'll be sat with Chase's still hand in her own, reminiscing about the old days of risqué sex in closets and all of the 'wonderful' things they did together.

She'll conveniently leave out the part where she left him close to breaking point because that's not part of the 'fairytale'. That's not part of the illusion that is Allison Cameron.

She's angry now, though, and her face contorts from pretty to grim

"You can't suddenly change your whole M.O and pretend to give a damn," she calls out. "You treated him like something you scraped off your shoe and now you're laying claim to him?"

It's so easy to lay the blame at someone else's door when your own blame runs so deep.

"I admit that I'm a hypocrite, Cameron," House replies. He looks her in the eye and says "Can you?"

He walks away. He can hear her sobbing and for a second it does strike a chord but he carries on walking, thankful at least that somebody fought Chase's corner on this matter; that someone thought of what was best for him and not best for the sobbing little child that's so desperate for something that nobody can give her.

**Part 12 and 13**

Cuddy has always felt something for chase. Pity, perhaps. Sympathy for the loveless life he has led.

To Cuddy, Chase has always been one of life's tragic figures, like Oliver Twist. She's felt pangs for him, maternal pangs, has seen the way his hair would fall so haplessly into his eyes and wanted to brush it away; tell him that life would be okay.

At times, she's wanted to hold him.

She imagines him as an eight-year-old boy with dirt on his face holding his hands out for something that would never come. That's how he looked to her down beneath the ground. Young. Needy. Not the cold, insular young man she has grown to care about, on some level; the not-so-rich boy they all assumed to know yet never did.

She looks in on him in recovery and it breaks her heart to see a man so fiercely independent looking so nakedly vulnerable. There is livid bruising to his bare chest. When Cuddy inhales she swears she can feel it. His lungs rise and fall with the mechanical push and pull of the ventilator he depends upon and it doesn't look healthy. It doesn't look real.

He looks like a mannequin. Perfect. Smooth. Robotic, almost.

He's not alone. Cuddy isn't surprised. She knows she'd do the same. She called Cameron because she felt she had a right to know, knows she would've wanted to know herself.

The observing doctor stands beside her, watching the patient through the window.

"She wouldn't leave. She was getting in the way. It was easier just to let her sit with him. She hasn't been any bother."

He's only been here four months. He doesn't know Cameron; doesn't know the history between the two of them. Not with any degree of clarity.

It's probably better that way.

"She hasn't taken her eyes off him in hours."

Drawn to him, she is, like a moth to a flame, so much easier to talk when he can't talk back. Cuddy wonders if Cameron is after absolution. Forgiveness. Chase is incapable of offering either.

She asks how he's doing. Fine, they say, considering all things. The surgery went well. No immediate complications. His vitals are stable. Slightly elevated temp but they're running through antibiotics. He's doing good. Real good, considering.

She looks serious, as if she wants straight talk and nothing else. This is a 'boss' talking, now, not a friend.

Cuddy wonders if she's ever been a friend.

"How bad was the damage when he was opened up?"

"Moderate. The fracture wasn't clean. The damage is isolated to the one area, but..."

" - Will he ever practice medicine again?"

The momentary pause is telling.

"It's too early to tell."

It makes her cold, somehow, those words, that truth.

She pulls get jacket closed and shivers, a little.

(*)

She just wants him clean. It's all she ever wanted, to wash away his sins and make him perfect again.

Cameron doesn't realise that Chase never was.

She lifts his hand gently and uses a warm towel to clean away the remnants of dirt that still lingers on his skin. She does it in silence because she has nothing to say.

His skin feels familiar but he's lost his shine, somehow. He's still beautiful, though, even like this

It's hard to believe she used to sleep in his arms when this whole thing feels like intruding.

"How long have you been here?" Cuddy asks. So lost was Cameron that she didn't even know she was there.

The voice is monotone. It's black and white. There's no colour in Cameron this morning.

"All night."

"Have you had any sleep?"

"No. I thought if I left him alone he might fade away."

He did, Cuddy wants to say. He did fade away, but he came back. He moved on. There's been light in his eyes, of late.

Don't ruin that, she wants to say, but she can't.

Cameron inhales deeply, a shuddering breath. She closes her eyes and imagines herself sat in a small wooden box talking to Cuddy from behind slats and grates.

This is confession with no God to hear.

"I wanted to make amends. I thought I could."

She can't. She never will.

Cuddy resents the fact she has to play mother, here, that she has to hold everyone's hand. She resents that she has to hold it together when she wants to bury her head in the sand.

"House told me to stay away as if I did this to him, as if this is my fault."

Harsh words. Harsh thoughts. Cuddy looks at Cameron, so lost in her own sense of concern, and she tells her that House is right.

"Not about it being your fault but about you needing to stay away."

She might not want to hear it. It might sound out of tune to Cameron's ears but she has to think of Chase. Even if it goes against everything she believes to be right, he is the important factor, here.

"If he wakes up and sees you here it's only going to confuse him. It's going to be hard enough for him without having to deal with his feelings for you. Chances are he might not remember who you are. What you are to him. Or, what you were...

Past tense. It only serves to remind Cameron she has no place here, now. She has no divine right.

"I don't want to hurt him…"

"Then, you need to leave him alone."

It's a bitter truth but it is the truth.

Cameron nods her head, doesn't trust her voice. She dries her eyes and draws to a close.

She touches Chase's hand. Squeezes it. The motion is unrequited. There's not a whimper, not a sigh. There's just…silence.

"I'm sorry", she says, because she is. Always was. She just hasn't said it.

It's hard to watch for Cuddy, this woman so wrapped up in bitter-sweetness, this slip of a girl who doesn't know what's right and what's best.

She watches Cameron lean down softly, so gently. She kisses Chase goodbye again.

She doesn't have to see his broken emptiness this time.

She tells him she loves him. Present tense. It's as painful to hear as it is to see. Then, she leaves. She leaves as if she was never here and the room is once more empty.

There is quiet. Stark quiet.

There is quiet and there is nothing.

Cuddy sits down next to Chase. For a moment she just looks at him, looks at his bruised body and his motionlessness. She imagines him with a pen in his mouth and a smile on his face and it's hard to see him so devoid of that character.

She feels guilt. Strong guilt.

She, too, tells him that she's sorry.

Then she picks up where Cameron left off, taking that cloth to his skin in comfort, in silence.

(*)

Three days.

Three days, they keep him sleeping, locked in a world where nothing happens; where he cannot even dream. His ICP remains low, his blood pressure stable. His temperature was a little elevated but the antibiotics brought it down to an acceptable level by the time forty-eight hours had passed.

His pulse is strong.

Chase fights hard, as hard as Wilson said he would, as readily as House anticipated he would on his lighter moments, doubted when the mood turned dark.

For three days, House sleeps in a plastic chair next to his bedside, no longer understanding the concept of 'visiting hours' because they don't apply to him; because this is his place and this is his employee and those two things alone give him rights beyond rights. Wilson gives up trying to drag him away and brings him dinner served in Tuppaware to save him from starving to death

Sometimes, he sits with him. They talk about Monster Trucks and baseball. It's normal. It's nice. Thirteen drops by with a toy poodle in a pink, studded collar. She leaves it at Chase's bedside and calls it a 'private joke'.

House wonders how much of Chase he doesn't know, how many parts of him are given away in tiny snippets to different people who exist in his life. He wonders if they all got together they'd each have tiny pieces of Chase that could be fit together to make a real person, a living, breathing jigsaw puzzle.

For three days Chase lies perfectly still, white bandages against white pillows, pale skin sinking back into the colourlessness of this place. He remains critical but stable, kept in such a base state that the only thing his brain has to focus on is remaining alive.

Machines breathe for him. Hospital staff feed him, wash him, care for him as if he were their child; as if they were the mother and father he no longer has. They remove his bandages to clean the wound in his head. It's livid, blood-red and stapled shut.

It's clean. Ugly, but clean.

His face looks so thin without the feathery-blond that usually frames it. House wonders if he'll ever look the same.

He mocks him incessantly, calls him lazy and work-shy, all the while wondering if he can hear him on any level; whether his voice is infiltrating the carefully created 'bubble' he's been placed within. He imagines Chase trapped inside of himself, desperate to retort but unable to do so, imagines that boyish face all crunched up and desperate, biting on that bottom lip so hard it bleeds. Bloody bastard, he'd call him.

Bloody bastard.

For three days it's just House and Chase. House, Chase and the noisy, incessant peacelessness of Intensive Care where Chase used to come, so ironically, to rest.

To seek quiet.

To kiss his wife where nobody could say a word.

Cameron doesn't come, knows House only too well, that he'll see this as a game, a challenge that she's not willing to pick up, at this moment in time. Cuddy doesn't tell House of her visit that first night, a private moment between a woman and the man she once loved.

She doesn't want to give House any ammunition…

She calls every day, twice a day, and is given the same information at every call.

No change.

House doesn't know what she's expecting. Chase is comatose. It's protocol, following neurosurgery, three days of silence before the patient is gradually brought back to the world; resurrected in stages. Still, she stays away, which House again sees as a victory as if he and she are vying for the attentions of a man who cannot give attention at all.

At the end of the third day House eats a stolen sandwich that Wilson lovingly prepared for himself and tells Chase that he's tired of watching him sleep.

He sighs.

He asks him, "Are you not pretty enough?"

**Part 13**

On the fourth day, Chase's sedation is reduced, his paralysis withdrawn entirely. The tube is removed from his throat and he's permitted to breathe the air for himself for the first time since the reflex was taken over from him. Chase wakes up in such a panic that he knocks a nurse unconscious as she's trying to reach him to calm him down. It's cliché. House should've known. It's a scene from a movie. He never should've left.

He promised he wouldn't leave but he had to…

Watching Chase cough so pitifully when they extubated left House with such a bitter taste that he found himself wanting to throw up; wanting to throw up as that too-long, too-thick tube was pulled from Chase's airway; as the alarm bells starting ringing as his oxygen levels dropped so harshly. House needed air as Chase tried to breathe it. He's seen it done a thousand times but never to Chase…never to Chase…

Never to Chase, whose screams he can hear, so pained in their gravel-throated agony, so muted in their still-sedated weakness but at least he's alive, he's alive to make those sounds.

"What happened?" he asks, as he moves as fast as his legs, leg, will carry him. Then more quietly, as if to ease the tension,"Did someone show him a mirror? For the love of God, it'll grow back."

He's joking – but he can't hide the tremble in his tone or the look, that look in his eyes that suggests he's scared out of his mind because this is the moment of the big reveal. This is that life or death second where it all just comes to fruition.

Foreman's been attending. He's been overlooking Chase's reintegration with the conscious world.

He shakes his head, as if the words he needs to speak are no longer a part of him.

(*)

"You restrained him? Jesus Christ, Foreman, what were you thinking?"

"I had no choice. He doesn't know what he's doing. He knocked the obs nurse unconscious. She's getting checked out in the ER as we speak. He attacks anyone that goes near him."

"He doesn't know where he is. You expected a loving embrace? A kiss on the cheek? When does this ever go smoothly?"

Foreman's own arms are scraped and bloodied where Chase clawed him in an effort to get free. Right now he's thrashing against the straps that hold him down, his eyes wild, his screams wilder.

"He needs a sedative, House. He can't go on like this."

"He just woke up and you want to snow him in again?"

"He's not stable."

His vitals are unstable. He's unstable, yet the only thing House sees when he looks at him now is a kid that's scared out of his mind and needs something that House is willing and able to give, even if Foreman isn't.

He'll take a risk because he knows what Chase is looking at, now, and it's not a pleasant sight. He knows the darkness, the depth and the terror of this disorientation because he's felt it, too.

"Give me a few minutes," House says. "If I can't get him calm you can drug him into next week. Just…give me a chance."

Foreman wants to refuse. He wants to refuse and keep Chase nice and tight, nice and safe, nice and unconscious until things are better; until he's less unstable.

He knows they're playing with fire every time they bring a person round after surgery like this…

"House, he's…"

" - Foreman, just give him a damn minute. He's not just anyone."

No, he's not.

Looking at House, now, worn and unshaven and still wearing yesterday's clothes, Foreman has to wonder if that's a negative point.

(*)

He unfastens the restraints and leaves Chase flailing and free. He lets those straps fall to his sides where Chase can see them. He wants him to know that they're not trying to hurt him; that this world of pain he's awoken to isn't something they're trying to enforce upon him.

His anger is unbridled. His fear, that's immeasurable.

"Shh," House says, "look. Look. They're off. They're gone."

The words don't get through. They don't penetrate. They don't breach the screaming, manic wall that Chase has built up around him and for a moment they're back down in that cave and Chase is yelling, yelling so loudly as if it's the only thing that tells him he's still alive.

"Look at me," House demands, pulling Chase's hands up together in front of him to 'ground' him, to centre him. "Listen to me, Chase."

Chase tries to pull away. He tries to escape. He refuses to look House in the eye because he's distressed, because he's confused and because he doesn't know what they want from him.

He has the feeling of being buried alive. He thrashes, his head moving from side to side as if he's trying to shake some sense into himself. He's only putting himself at risk.

"Chase, stop acting like a child."

It's hard to get through to someone whose brain is compromised; whose body depends upon mechanical interventions to keep it functioning. The monitor begins to wail. It takes House back to the rude awakening in the back of the ambulance when Chase's body began to seize and when everything became suffocatingly real. His wrenching, writhing wildness leaves his arm bleeding as he tears out his arterial line. It spurts momentarily before settling on a pretty red pattern splattered across the white of the bed sheets.

Rorschach has nothing on Chase…

"Look what you've done," House says, as stern as a teacher, "we're going to have to put that back in. You want to pull a few more out and have us replace them, too? It won't be pretty. You know that much."

His tone is unpleasant but the blood and the voice break through the panic. The blood frightens Chase. His face reflects the abject terror as he tries to get up; tries to get away but the grip tightens. House won't let him do this and even when he takes Chase's fist to the side of his face he won't give in.

It doesn't hurt. He doesn't draw blood. It won't even bruise but it's enough. If he weren't in such a state House would undoubtedly hit him back but right now that's not important. What's important is that he's still. Quiet.

Alive, but not like this. He'll leave fingermarks over Chase's arms but he doesn't care, doesn't care that he'll mark him and bruise him, doesn't care that he'll write his signature across the pale skin. Sometimes it takes a firm hand.

"Damn it, STOP struggling. Stop!"

The struggles lessen, then they cease. The look of utter wildness in Chase's eyes fades away replaced by something else, something different.

"Just…stop," House reiterates, as if to consolidate it, as if to make sure.

For a few moments there is quiet. Perfect silence.

House looks at Chase. Chase tries to look back. House speaks Chase's name – but Chase doesn't remember him. Not with any degree of certainty or clarity. Everything is familiar but it's all just out of his reach. House is just a man to him. He knows that he knows him but he doesn't know how.

"What do you want?" House asks him. "What do you need?"

It's part of the problem, the fact that he can't tell them. They say that the majority of children's tantrums come down to being unable to communicate their needs. Chase can't communicate his. He can't communicate what he's feeling because he can't remember how to speak

Words evade him. It should ease off once the swelling subsides but there are no guarantees. There never could be.

"Show me, if you can't tell me."

Chase just feels…out of control, but the blood scares him and the serious look in the other man's eyes puts the fear of God into him. He feels his own heart racing in his chest and it hurts. It hurts.

He knows, on some base level, that he cannot be trusted. He hurt that woman. He heard her cry out.

He hit this man.

He hurt her, he hit him and he doesn't know why; knows he can't do it again. Mustn't.

He whimpers, a plaintive cry. Again, he looks five years old with his head swathed in bandages and a feeding tube taped to the side of his frightened face, marring it somehow, spoiling it.

He closes his eyes, places his wrists into those unfastened restraints slowly, so slowly. He reflect something dark and empty, something wholly broken. He relinquishes control because he can't control himself. He asks to be restrained because he's so overwhelmed that he can't be trusted.

House watches his unsteady movements, uncoordinated, sluggish. Chase was never graceful but he was never this unsteady, either.

"You don't trust yourself. Is that right?"

Chase tries to respond but he can't. There's a 'link' that's been severed somewhere inside of him; a program that can't run because someone's deleted some of the relevant code. He's frustrated by his own lack of communicative skills. He can't tell them what he wants, what he needs, because it's all disjointed inside of him. There's no way of getting it out.

House touches his wrist. Touches the leather strap that he just removed from it. It's left a bruise already. It's left a mark.

He circles his finger absently over that wrist, feels the pulse quicken beneath him before those beeping monitors pick up on it. He knows that Chase wants to say something but can't, doesn't know how. The way that he swallows, the way that he shifts, the way that he looks so defeated…

House just understands.

"Do I need to put these back on?"

The eyes flicker to the left, to the right. The movement is slight but it's a response that House identifies and analyses. He reads it well. House offers him kinaesthetic communication as well as verbal in case he doesn't understand.

He touches his wrist. He touches the leather strap. He eyes him as if he's asking the question and Chase pushes his hand further, indicating what it is he requires.

"You understand what you need," House says. "That's a start. I wonder if you ever did before. I guess you're better off, in that sense."

Chase needs to be restrained.

He needs to know that he's safe.

House fastens the right wrist down slowly, as if to offer Chase the chance to change his mind. He doesn't miss the way the forearms tense, as if he's fighting against himself, but he doesn't pull his arms away. When House fastens the left wrist it's with more care. It's supported, his healing shoulder protected by pillows strategically placed behind it.

The elbow is encased in plaster, hindering the movement already. House assumes the cast on his arm is what injured the nurse but the fact is he was out of his mind, frighteningly confused by the kaleidoscope that forms his brain, these days.

"It wasn't your fault," he tells Chase. "You just…reacted."

He brushes a hand over Chase's head as if to prove a point. The reaction, once again, is violent. The look in Chase's eyes is one of uncontrollable rage, tempered only by pure, unadulterated terror. He makes a sound that's painful to hear, a stuttered mess of a word that House can't make any sense of at all. Don't, it could be. Stop. Leave.

Help. Please. Don't let me do this.

He's a wild animal, cornered and prodded with sticks and fingers.

"You don't want to be touched," House says, and he can't hide the fact that his heart skipped a beat, then, and his adrenaline went into overdrive. "I get that."

Another sound. Another unintelligible plea.

Another desperate look in eyes that look far, far too young to be this damaged.

"You get scared. You panic. You lash out. This place might as well be the Twilight Zone, for all you can understand it."

All of these people he doesn't remember trying to take pieces of him away with them to analyse and understand.

All of these pieces of machinery attached to his body; all of these tubes going in and out, constantly toyed with, constantly checked...

All of these sad, sad faces that he knows he should recognise but doesn't. All of these faces expecting something from him yet never quite establishing what.

Chase closes his eyes. He turns his head away, away from House, away from this man that's speaking to him in a voice that sounds so familiar; whose looking at him with eyes that he knows, that he's always known.

That's treating him in the way he feels he needs to be treated. Sternly. Harshly.

This man doesn't look at him as if a look alone could break him.

"You feel helpless because you can't do anything for yourself," House says. "You want to be left alone."

It's what House would want.

If Chase has any idea what is being said he doesn't show it. He just blinks slowly and stares. It's as if he can see beyond people but not inside of them; as if the world is something he can look through but can't be a part of, an almost-autistic quality as he lingers between worlds. House imagines he's underwater, fighting to emerge. It's a struggle and it takes time. Effort. It's exhausting.

This time, when House touches Chase's head he doesn't lash out. He just…lies there.

"Just rest. You look like shit."

He pushes a syringe into the IV line in Chase's wrist and watches as his eyes begin to flicker. It's light. It won't snow him but it'll help.

"I can make you sleep," he says, as if it's an achievement, but what he's really saying is "Give in to me. I can do what I think is best. I can help you."

Trust me, he says.

House knows how difficult it is not to trust yourself. He knows how it goes against human nature to place yourself at the mercy of somebody else; to relinquish control entirely.

He also knows that Chase needs this right now, this security, this protection against himself.

The aggression is a symptom; a side-effect of the damage that was done to him.

A by-product of fear.

Whether or not it'll form part of this patched-up, sewn together Robert Chase is yet to be seen.

**Part 14**

His interest in work is half-hearted, at best. He tries to draw it up from inside of himself but the reserves are dehydrated and in need of life support. It's hard to keep your focus in one place when your mind is back in a man-made mistake of a cavern and your thoughts are in a dark, clinical room just as claustrophobic as that place was.

Dimmed down, Chase's room is overbearing. Oppressive. It's intimidating, the flashing screens and the hanging bags, the lines and wires and plugs and sensors. House wonders if he escaped that prison only to be placed into another.

House feels trapped, too – trapped by the feelings Chase's vulnerability have brought up him. He doesn't feel right. He doesn't feel able to fight off the concern he knows he's exhibiting yet tries so hard to hide. He wonders whether that's why he's drawn to the young man; why he chooses to spend his every spare moment sat watching him.

They're both vulnerable.

There's something they share, now, the terror and fear of looking death in the face and laughing at it; at crawling out of Hell before it all collapsed around them. He wonders whether they exchanged something, down there in that place and whether they'll never be able to take it back. House feels as if Chase holds a piece of him, now, and if he were to let go he'd tip downwards, He would freefall.

He feels that Chase would, too, would descend into the chaos that drew them together.

It's amazing how relaxed Chase looks when he sleeps. House wonders if he ever looked this relaxed before, always noted something in his young employee, something pent up, something bubbling beneath that perfect façade.

Now, he watches him rest. He watches him awaken, too, sometimes to panicked alarms and desperate hands holding him down whilst the disorientation cuts through him but sometimes just to silence. Chase will look House in the eye and there'll be recognition there. There'll be familiarity.

He'll stare at House as if taking him in; as if trying to find a 'match' in the mismatch of his fractured brain.

"House. My name is House. Say it. You kiss my ass on a daily basis, for Christ sake. It's just one lousy syllable."

Chase doesn't even try.

It frustrates House as much as it unnerves him and when the doctors tell him not to expect too much he wants to scream at them loudly and tell them how much potential might well be lost if he doesn't 'expect too much', if he simply lets Chase become complacent in his confused little world.

Last night, Chase lay there tapping his fingers against the side of the bed. In a moment of exhausted hope, House wondered if he were tapping out Morse Code but there was no pattern to the movement. There was no code.

He pressed a hand against Chase's hand, restraining it, stilling it. Chase had smiled, as if House's presence pleased him, as if happy that his repetitive behaviour was forcefully stopped. He curled his fingers up in his sheets for security. For orientation. Then those soft, unfocused eyes slipped shut again, his face almost content.

House spent hours searching for meaning in the exchange but finding none.

Sometimes, when things start spinning out of control all Chase wants is for somebody to care enough stop him. To intervene. To hold his hands, tight and firm...

Sometimes, when he feels overwhelmed he just wants someone to touch him, to press a hand to his body. Head. Shoulder. Arm. It doesn't matter. The physical contact calms him, always did.

Chase will fall asleep if someone strokes his hair, a fact which Cameron found so sweet and endearing...

"Strong bonds are formed through near-death experiences," Cuddy tells him when she finds him once again sat beside the silent, sleeping doctor. She's used to finding him sleeping in empty exam rooms but of late he's drawn to this place. "It's natural you feel the need to be here."

"Strong bonds? Pffht. He has a TV that he's not watching and a chair with an awesome backrest. It's quiet."

"You haven't been home in days."

"I can catch a bit of shut-eye here without having to listen to Wilson bang the re-invented ex through the paper-thin walls."

"House…"

"You think I'm here for him? Seriously?"

"House, listen."

"The pommie idiot's not worth my time. I just like the ambience of this place."

"Greg, you need to get back to work."

Greg, now?

She blurts it out as if she's frightened to say it. House can feel her discomfort as readily as he can see it. Her face looks strained. She looks tense, terse and uncomfortable, as if asking him to do his job is something that's beyond her own right.

Her voice is when she tells him she understands his concern. He wants to laugh in her face and tell her she wouldn't have the faintest idea but instead he stands back and lets her have her say as she ponders the consequence of 'the team' being two men down instead of one.

She repeats herself.

"You need to get back to work. Have you even slept?"

"Quite well, actually. He doesn't snore. Does Lucas? Your eyes are looking a little dark these days."

She ignores the jibe, doesn't want to play along. She doesn't want to revisit the place she was in with House on the day this all happened.

"I understand you feel responsible for him."

"Oh, I don't feel responsible, Cuddy. I didn't send him underneath the ground chasing ghosts."

The words which go unspoken are 'you did', but that's neither fair nor right. Still, House knows that Cuddy heard them by the way she blinks a little too long, a little too hard, and swallows as if her throat were full of razor blades.

"You're not helping him and you're not helping yourself. More importantly, you're not helping this hospital. What happened to him is terrible but life goes on. He's being taken care of. He's safe."

"Safe. Right."

She sighs, as if reasoning with House is taking something out of her. She's been doing that more often, recently. House wonders if she's finally about to snap.

"House, he sleeps 20 hours a day. He doesn't need you watching him while he does it."

"He doesn't need to wake up alone. It doesn't sit well with him."

"Robert will be fine. It'll just take time."

There's something distasteful and frankly disturbing about the way she calls him 'Robert' in that same manner she personalises the dead; the way she calls terminal patients by their first name because she believes they deserve that 'respect'.

House looks at her.

Sometimes, she just couldn't see past her own name on the sign across her pretty, oak-carved door.

"I'm sure Robert would appreciate you doing your job, Cuddy. I'm sure he'd understand that your own staff comes secondary to the running of this place but I'm not going to leave him alone."

"I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to do your job. By all means, sit with him in your spare time but we need you. I need you."

Yeah, House thinks.

Yeah, but he needs me more.

(*)

He arrives in his own diagnostics room as fresh as a daisy.

He doesn't do this for her, he does it for himself. He knows that Chase will be 'out' for at least six hours after the dosage he was given to get him through the process of cleaning the wound in his shoulder. It's packed. They've left it 'open' to reduce the risk of infection. The exit wound at the elbow was surgically dealt with, neatened and tidied, but the shoulder was a problem. The scars will be substantial but they're allowing it to heal from the inside out, just as they hope he will.

"Good morning," he tells his loyal pets, and when they ask him what he's doing there he pretends he hasn't heard them.

He's there because his back was beginning to hurt and his head was beginning to swim and he felt he needed something more.

The file is, as is customary, made of paper. When House slams it down on the table it sounds as though it's made of stone.

"Case," he says, stating the obvious.

It's 6.15 in the morning. Outside the window there is battering rain and grey, grey skies. It's dark, shades of black and dismal; hues of misery. Thirteen mentions something about the rain putting her in bad spirits but House doesn't believe the weather is reflective of mood. To think so, he believes, would be narcissistic. Egocentric. Two of the things they say he is but he believes he isn't.

"What do we have?" she asks. Her tone reads '"his had better be good."

"Eighteen year old female presenting with left-sided numbness, blood in the urine and respiratory distress."

It's not 'good' in the juicy sense of the word. It's not 'good' in the House definition of what 'good' is. His 'team' look blank, devoid of life this early in the morning. House, himself, has not slept but to look at him you wouldn't know. His eyes are still the same shade of cobalt-blue as they always are. The whites, they're…white, as if to spite Cuddy and her accusations of him not taking care of himself.

How she'd blushed when he sarcastically asked her to do it for him.

"Come on, people, look alive."

At least one of his team, currently absent, doesn't look alive at all but even Chase, in all his sedated, head-injured'glory', has more to him than they do.

Of them all it's Taub that looks the most worn down, the late nights getting the better of him.

"Look alive. There's no coffee, it's freezing cold and it's still dark outside. How are we supposed to function on four hours of sleep with no coffee?"

"Job satisfaction. The pleasure of being part of this team who, it seems, you've taken it upon yourself to speak on behalf of. Since when did you become head boy?"

"Not today," Taub replies.

Taub was never the favoured one. Never will be. House brushes him off as if his cries of tiredness and discomfort are insignificant.

"Symptoms came on periodically over two days. Little Miss Former Cheerleader didn't think the blood in the urine was a big deal, which only serves to back up my view that teenage girls are all idiots."

Thirteen takes the file first. It's not the usual 'pattern'. Normally it's Foreman. Then Thirteen. Then Chase. Taub waits until last, reads as if it's an afterthought and House wonders whether or not this is the hierarchy; the Chain of Command, with Foreman and Thirteen as the dominant 'parents' and Chase and Taub as the children that fight for the scraps.

Everything feels different today. The room is less 'sunshine' without Chase in it. Foreman's too black. Thirteen's too brunette. Taub's too…bald. It's like having a roast dinner without the potatoes, a game of football with only ten men.

It's a classroom without the scapegoat and they're all sombre, as if they're lost.

"Discuss amongst yourselves," House says as he fingers the black marker thoughtfully. "First person to come up with something interesting gets to feel good about themselves."

He puts the end of the pen in his mouth and it's as if he's wanting to recreate a piece of his absent employee in this room. Oral fixation, Chase called it, but House would just call it distraction. A habit stemming from insecurity.

The plastic tastes offensive but it's smooth on his tongue.

House enjoys the sensation.

"Paralysis indicates neurological," Taub says finally, when nobody else volunteers. He's the kid in the classroom that's too good to raise his hand, the one that knows all the answers yet rarely volunteers them because it's so beneath him. His voice holds that tone, as if this is all so easy for him, even when it's not.

House thinks it a defence mechanism because all his life he's been somewhat hopeless and he wants people to think that at least he's smart.

"Anyone else?"

"Kidney infection. Pneumonia."

Thirteen doesn't need to try. She was born with a gift of beauty but her liberal feminism lets her down, at times. House finds her cold and rigid, an ice-maiden, as such.

She's the only one of the three who hasn't been to visit, yet, other than to drop off that stupid stuffed toy. House wonders if it's because she sees herself in that hospital bed in years to come, achingly still and unable to function correctly. It's a state she sees almost every day but not in someone close to her.

He wonders if she's imagining them leaving flowers at her bedside; talking to her when she can't talk back.

"Neurological issue. Kidney infection. Pneumonia. That's three."

Thirteen is such an unlucky number. "They say bad luck comes in threes…"

"And, here it is sat right in front of me with ill-fitting shirts, no cleavage and bags under his middle aged eyes after a midnight booty call."

He stares at Taub and asks, "Was she good?"

"Could be a blood-borne bacterial infection," Foreman says, ignoring the slight on his colleague's fidelity. "File says she's been doing a lot of travelling recently. She could've been bitten without knowing – "

" – travelling to Texas, not Kenya. Do you actually read the notes or do you just fill in the blanks?"

The sarcasm doesn't flow like it should. Right about here would be where he dreamed up an anecdote for his aforementioned blond scapegoat to fit the also aforementioned 'unlucky rule of three', a story of how a poor, young man from the other side of the globe was unfortunate enough to be born with an aversion to fashion, an absent parentage and an inability to hold down a marriage.

Chase is so easy, with red and white circles on his forehead that only House can see. House seems lost without the interaction, can't find anything clever to say.

He's hindered by lack of inspiration, struck dumb, as if he's lost his mojo.

It gnaws at him, bites away flesh, skin and spirit and that little voice in the back of his head tells him he shouldn't really be here.

"House – "

He realises he's been staring at an empty whiteboard for two full minutes, his silence and thought broken only by the sound of Foreman's voice.

He looks up.

Then, he gives up, absolves himself of responsibility because it's about time he gave them some of their own.

"The patient, House? She's not going to send the answers telepathically to the whiteboard if you stare at it long and hard enough."

No, she isn't.

He looks up, taps his cane against the side of the table. His body language suggests that he's done; that he's wrapping things up.

He throws the pen to Foreman, his Second in Command and his reflex is excellent, if nothing else, as he catches it in his left hand.

"She's all yours," he says, as he wipes his hands of all of them. They don't entertain him. They don't hold his attention. This case, it's not unbreakable. "If you can't figure out something as simple as this then you shouldn't be working for me."

He wonders if that's why he took it, so that he could pass it off to them without having that itching, gnawing worry that they're going to mess it all up.

So that he could palm it off without Cuddy telling him he's passing the buck.

"Where are you going?" Foreman asks, as if he doesn't already know.

"I'm putting in a shift in the ICU. Beats clinic duty. Don't squabble amongst yourselves when I'm gone. Foreman's the oldest so he's in charge."

"I'm older," Taub says, then shifts a little as if it's uncomfortable to admit.

House stares at him, deadpan, mock judgmental.

"Foreman has morals. It's important."

(*)

**Part 15**

The conscious world, to Chase, is a cavernous mouth trying to pull him forth and devour him. It's intimidating and frightening, as though there is a film over everything and everything is simply too bright, too loud, too large, too much.

He screams, a sound he can't hear but can feel in his throat, struggles hard but isn't able to move. He imagines it's hands holding him down and the voice that shouts in his face is threatening and damaging.

He feels a pull in his wrist as it twists. The pain shoots up his arm, white-hot, agonising.

It hurts. It hurts as they hurt. It hurts as they hurt him.

"Chase, it's House," the voice tells him. "My name is House. You know me. You know me, Chase. Stay with me. Just look at me."

Louder, louder, and then softer. Quieter. He struggles to hear but he doesn't want to hear. He struggles to remember, doesn't want to remember.

The warm liquid in his veins sends him back underground, enveloped, as such, by the pull of drugs combining to create such a lulled world; a world which exists only to keep him safe and secure and yet ultimately scare him to death.

It's the drugs that do this to him; the drugs that soften him, at first, but eventually mess with his head.

When Chase was at school he 'experimented' with pharmaceuticals, a reckless, wayward move that he attributed to rebellion, to the need to shove it all in Daddy's face. On Friday nights he'd go out with the other kids. They'd party on the beach with log fires that they'd dance around as though they were ritualistic cannibals; tribal leaders, or the like.

They'd listen to The Prodigy which was noise, to many, but to them was an expression of the inner conflict of youth.

Chase would smoke weed to 'calm down', would enjoy the sedate, tranquil, peaceful world it placed him in because his own life was so full of chaos, the remnants of a dead mother on one hand and the fragments of an absent father on the other.

He never got on with his father's new wife, hated her spoiled daughters whose names were as pretentious as they were. Melandra. Beatrice. Twins, two years older than he was. Melandra rode horses and Beatrice studied philosophy. His father doted upon them soon after he married their mother in a way he never doted on his son. Years later, he would leave them his all whilst his own flesh and blood got nothing. Perhaps Chase reminded him of his mother. Perhaps he simply didn't love him as he should.

It was the first time he tried LSD that it all went horribly wrong. The trip had hit him hard, so hard that the colours and the swirls became his reality and he found himself falling into them, gathered into their damning arms and held there. The high was overwhelming and he succumbed to it entirely. His father found him passed out on the kitchen floor, his pupils dilated, breathing shallow - his heart so fast it almost burst through his called an ambulance when his son failed to respond; when he couldn't bring him round to face up to what he'd done.

How ashamed the mighty Rowan Chase was that his own son was treated for a drug overdose at the very hospital he made his name.

Dad sent him to England to finish his studies, a way of wiping his hands of his only son. There was no fear of him feeling homesick because Chase had no home. No real family.

He received prestigious schooling courtesy of Daddy's bank balance but he found England prissy and uptight, hated the way people spoke, hated the way they walked, hated the way they talked in accents that sounded similar to his own yet so very different.

He hated the rain, the grey skies – hated the Winter because he was always averse to the cold.

When he was eighteen he met a girl named Anne, an artist from his own neck of the woods. She was small with mousy hair and large blue eyes, referred to a 'tinny' instead of a 'beer' in a way that made him smile and miss his old friends. She was funny and cute and smart and she pushed him, pushed him and encouraged him and challenged him in a way that nobody had before.

He related to her Aussie smile; her effervescent way of simply living.

They were both fish out of the ocean and, when the other students were busy planning trips down canals on barges and boats, Robbie and Anne were dreaming of the white-tips of the surf, the salt-spray that burned and cooled at once, the only water worthwhile. Whilst the other students were throwing snowballs at Christmastime, Robbie and Anne longed to feel the sand in their 'thongs', shoes and not underwear.

They moved in together at nineteen. Robbie's allowance covered the rent and Anne never judged him; never mocked him about where the money came from but of course their parents didn't approve. Too much too soon, Rowan stated, but Chase didn't give a damn. He'd been 'responsible' since the age of twelve, the man of the house since he was fifteen, when his father decided he no longer wanted the responsibility.

"I grew up long ago," he told his father and it wasn't something Rowan should be proud of, this forced maturity, this worldliness before his years.

They rented a flat above a green-grocers and at night, the scent of fresh grown mint gave a cleanliness to the somewhat-run down place, furnished it with young love, beautiful in a sense, unrealistic in another.

For awhile they were their own little contained 'unit', their own Australia in the middle of Oxford, England.

The 'honeymoon period' lasted nine months until Anne earned herself a place at an art academy in Queensland.

Robbie had to let her go because he loved her; because it was her big opportunity to make something of herself and who would he be to stand in her way?

It still didn't change the fact that she broke his heart.

Their aching goodbye was painful and for years Robert Chase swore off women because women always leave, even when they have to, starting with his mother and continuing with Anne, a girl who said she'd never leave him, that she'd give him a son with blond, blond hair and a smile so big it'd light up Sydney.

Anne still keeps in touch, even now. She's married to man named Jacob. They have two sons, Finlay and Jackson, who have their father's jet black hair and their mother's blue eyes.

She doesn't do it to rub it in. She does it because she said she'd never leave him and in that sense, she hasn't.

Chase still feels alone, though.

He awakens with her name on his lips but he can't say it, can't breathe it. Deep down he knows she doesn't exist any more; that she's no longer a part of this frightening world.

But, this man is.

This man, with eyes as blue as Anne's and a gazing intensity that Chase feels, as well as sees.

This man hasn't left.

He shifts, his body achingly heavy, his mind even heavier. He remembers the last words he heard before he was forcibly sent to sleep.

"House," he says, though his voice is slim and his confidence thinner. He fights to put the words together in his head, fights to drag them from the depths. They're barely audible. They fit together so raggedly it's almost sharp. "Y-your name is…House."

He tries to gage the reaction from the other man; tries to look into those so-familiar eyes and see that he's done no wrong.

To see that he hasn't disappointed.

**Part 16**

He knows House's name.

He knows House's name – but it's not quite that simple, knows it because he was told it recently, knows him because he's seen him as he flitted out of consciousness these past few days. He knows he knows him…but he doesn't know how.

Doesn't remember.

Chase doesn't know House as anything but a constant presence that's watched him as he slept and talked him down when his unbridled anger, fear and tension has reached its dangerous peaks.

Chase doesn't know House, doesn't know this place – doesn't know this present time, because to him he doesn't belong in it. He's tired and numb. He's rattled, like all of his pieces have been jumbled around in such a way that he can't quite put them all together.

He's certain there's a piece missing and that the piece is integral because none of this makes sense to him.

"You were in an accident," House explains, and whilst Chase understands the majority of words, now, he has no recollection of the event. "You wanted to play Mr Invincible and you took a few rocks to your head in the process. It's scrambled you up a little. Made a mess in that pretty head of yours. If I didn't know you better I'd think you were suicidal. Going down there was just stupid."

House doesn't acknowledge the fact that his own stupidity took him down that very same route; that his own mind is often as addled and scrambled as Chase's is because he refuses to acknowledge fear. Danger. Life-threatening idiocy.

"You're such an idiot I should've left you down there."

He shines a bright light in Chase's eye and the young man growls a little because it's a jarring brightness he's not ready for and it's all just still so unclear.

"Do you know who you are? Do you know your name?"

The questions frustrate him as much as they did beneath the surface of the Earth but Chase doesn't remember that; doesn't remember how he clung to this man, mentally, so as to save himself, how he depended upon him to help him emerge from the wreckage.

There's a wreckage that is Chase right about now and it's only now that he's awake it'll start to become clear.

Who will help him emerge from that wreckage is unclear, right now.

"Robert Chase," he says, weakly. Finally. He says it as one word instead of two. He says it slowly and deliberately.

His voice doesn't sound like it used to.

"Place of birth. Occupation."

"Melbourne." A pause. He searches for the answer but it doesn't feel right to him. "Med student."

If he notices House's ill-restrained flinch he doesn't take issue with it.

"What's your speciality?"

"Intensive Care." He looks around slowly. At times, it's difficult to understand what he's saying. He sounds intoxicated. Drunk. All of the things he condemns. "Is that where I am?"

"Call it a hands-on field trip," House replies. "You're getting valuable experience you might never have had if you hadn't already experienced what it's like to be buried six feet under."

For a moment, House pauses. He tries to sketch back into Chase's past, to pinpoint times and dates in order to establish just how much Chase has lost of himself.

"What about Seminary School?"

He hits a nerve.

The blush is deep. It's red, beginning on his cheeks and spreading all over his face. He swallows, then grimaces. His throat hurts. He can feel something in the back of it, resting, invading. From what he's learned at school he'd equate that to an NG tube. He put one down the nose of a plastic premature baby in class not so long back, kept doing it wrong.

He imagines he has abrasions in his throat from an endo-tracheal

He blinks long and hard as if to try to focus his thoughts. His mind wanders from one place to the next and then back to where it should be.

Seminary school. A turning point in his life.

Another failed experiment with faith.

"That didn't work out," he replies. "Wasn't for me."

God didn't replace the 'love' he lost when Anne left; didn't comfort him when his mother's anniversary cropped up.

God didn't 'touch' him like He should've done.

"Lost one of your trials, right?"

Blue-green eyes so wide, so sad, so…vulnerable, as if House has invaded him, somehow - as if he's taken something from inside him that he's never really shared before.

"I guess…"

"How old are you?"

He shifts. When he looks down he realises his wrists are bound to the side of the bed; that as well as medical equipment he's manually restrained.

His awareness comes back to him in waves.

He looks disturbed as he weakly tries to tug his arms to his body, ignoring the pain as it runs up his elbow and shoulder.

"Why am I tied up?"

House doesn't flinch.

"I asked first. Age?"

"Twenty…"

Again, unsure. It's not that he believes he's twenty because he thinks that's most likely wrong. It's just that everything in him - his feelings, his thoughts, his awareness – have reverted back in years to that time.

That dream of Anne seemed so far away – but his emotions are the same as if she'd only just left him. That's how raw it is. That's how painful.

He looks a little scared.

"I-I think I'm twenty."

He says it because he doesn't know any better and if he is wrong, House doesn't tell him he's wrong. It's a momentary show of compassion. It's also a tactic to keep him calm because House wants him here in the present, even if it's an altered present, and he knows that any overwhelming emotion could send him reeling backwards again.

He doesn't want him free-falling. He doesn't want him spinning away and out of control as if gravity no longer holds him.

Still, he makes his notes. He asks his questions gently, for him. Gently, for Chase.

"President?

The patient looks uncertain. His eyes search for an answer slowly. His processing is as slow as molasses in January as he moves through the treacle.

"Prime Minister is John Howard. President is…Bill Clinton?"

The answer is correct, if this were 1999.

Now, he just looks desperate.

"Please. Why am I tied up?"

"Because you asked to be. It's kind of your thing these days. Preferred name?"

Its clear the ties are not coming off; that House isn't going to let him go that easily. He stops moving in the restraints. His hands rest limply at his sides but he pushes his head further into the pillow.

He looks every inch the twenty-year-old he somewhat believes himself to be.

"People call me Robbie. Or Rob. My friends call me Chase. My dad just calls me 'boy'."

Present tense. House doesn't think him ready to know that he's actually an orphan; a soon-to-be-divorced orphan with a colourful employment record and a potential murder charge in his future, if it ever comes to light.

He just focuses on the name.

"Chase it is," House replies, as though taking on the role of a friend when in actual fact he's just seizing the chance for normalcy. "How are you feeling? Any pain? Pressure?"

"I'm tired," Chase tells him, and it reflects in his face, the residue of sedatives still lingering, always lingering, the pressure of an injured brain still pressing, pushing, overtaking. "No pain, though."

"There shouldn't be. You're on the good-if-potentially-addictive stuff."

"I have an addictive personality," Chase says, softly.

House thinks he likes him this honest.

Even if his words aren't clear the meanings are.

(*)

Time crawls. It drags itself along as if it's heavy and laden.

Still, House stays.

Chase feels stoned. The world turns in slow-motion and he finds it difficult to concentrate. He doesn't remember being violent and unable to speak. It's only now that House has talked his attending doctor into reeling in the drugs that he's beginning to come into focus.

He's not focusing well.

He still doesn't know who House is. He just knows that his name is House. He doesn't know where this place is, just knows he's in hospital; that he'll probably be here for a long time and that his injuries are severe.

He understands that because he understands medicine, to some extent. He understands because he's learned some of this from text-books and work experience.

He understands…but he doesn't understand. He knows that House is American and that the doctors who continually try to get a rise out of him, it seems, are American, too.

"I'm in America." Chase says. He looks…lost. Sad, almost. "I was in England."

Mentally, he's on the other side of the world and House treads gently, as if walking a field of mines.

"You were in England ten years ago. You studied there for awhile."

There are no words for that. Chase's lips part and he lets out what can only be described as a strained sigh.

"You seem to have some memory issues," House concludes finally, understating on purpose because it's the best thing to do. "Don't worry, though. I'm sure we'll have you back up to date in no time. Back in the good old present with all its fascinating issues and nuances."

It could've been worse, House thinks, or tries to think. Chase remembers how to move, how to breathe. He remembers how to read, though his eyes are less clear than they were.

He remembers how to exist and how to function – but, he doesn't remember how his life has progressed this past decade.

When House calls him Jason Bourne he doesn't understand why.

That movie doesn't exist, where Chase is right now.

(*)

When Chase was nineteen he wanted to be a musician. Or, a priest. It was his mother that did that to him, that led him to question humanity in such a way that he'd devote his life to seeking solace in an unseen entity that supposedly governs this life.

His faith was strong, back then, because he had nothing else, just his thoughts. Just his apartment.

Just an empty space where what he equated as love once was.

Chase was never pious. He just wanted to be. When the living world failed him time and time again, Chase just wanted to seek comfort in the spiritual.

Right now, he just wants to sleep, just wants to close his eyes and shut out this baffling world that he doesn't feel right in, that is clearly skewed and wrong.

But, House won't leave him alone.

"I just want to rest," he almost pleads. "I just want to close my eyes."

"Are you in pain?"

"No, but – "

" – unless you're in pain I want you awake. It's good for you. You're stable. We need to start keeping you awake now that we've been cutting back on the meds. You can handle it."

"Yeah? How do you know what I can handle?"

He watches Chase fight against the anger that's building. He watches as he tenses. As he trembles.

He watches a vein throb in his temple and it's an indicator. It's a sign.

"Do I need to restrain you again?"

"NO."

"Then, stop acting like a spoiled teenager and eat something. I'm not the enemy, here. You want things done so you have to work for them."

Life can't always be handed to you on a plate, he wants to say, but a 20-year-old Chase might not appreciate such a sentiment, whilst a 30-year-old Chase might just accept it as a sweeping generalisation.

House tells him he needs to eat something if he wants the tube out, that choking, grating, uncomfortable tube that feeds him something with a consistency of wallpaper paste and the look of cottage cheese.

He tells Chase he'll have to drink something if he wants off the saline drip.

"Sloth doesn't suit you," he says, as he tries to get Chase to understand. He speaks to him bluntly. He's seen how some of the attending nurses speak to the patient as if he deaf or, worse still, stupid, and he won't treat him like a child.

Chase just stares at him angrily. Wildly, almost. Obstructive. Defiant, but so tired.

So tired.

"Just eat the damn thing," House yells, finally, "it won't kill you. It won't even hurt you. I'd guess you've lost fifteen pounds since you've been in this room. You don't have to worry about your hips or your svelte figure."

The raised voice shocks him a little. The patient looks petulant, then, his lip curling up in reminiscence of a fallen leaf. House has never seen this look on Chase before. He wonders whether the head injury has opened up a whole new door; a brand new catalogue of expressions and emotions he once kept hidden yet now doesn't know how to.

"But, I don't want it."

Small voice. Young, and childlike.

House bites back a laugh, not wanting this strange new creature to think that he's being mocked. He'll hold it in. He'll save it for later. Now that he has Chase here he doesn't want to frighten him away.

Chase, with his jagged hair. Chase, with his unrestrained smile, with his unbridled emotions, with his vigorous rage.

He looks like he wants to cry.

"Nothing makes sense to me," he says, quietly. "I don't know what any of this is."

And, it's only now that House realises just how hard this must be for him, how hard it is to simply not understand why you're so laboured; why you're so bound down by bewilderment.

His voice breaks a little.

"I'm so confused."

"The brain is like a computer with huge disc space. Imagine the biggest hard drive you can find full of the biggest selection of downloaded Internet porn with still enough space for more."

The analogy is lost on Chase but he tries to see the logic in it. He tries to find the truth and the meaning but his processor is running slowly and sometimes it freezes entirely.

"The mind is more complex. It's a building full of doors and corridors, each leading to a new thought and a new set of rules and flaws. Behind some of the doors are memories. Behind others, there are life experiences. They're always accessible to us because we are the masters of our domain."

"Some of your doors are locked. When you took that hit to the head the doors got jammed shut. You can't access the information because the function that allowed you to do that got screwed."

He explains further. The way he speaks to Chase is complex but Chase's world is so dumbed down, at present, that House feels he needs to be stimulated, mentally, rather than wrapped up in blankets; averted to the point of over-protection.

"You can't control your temper because your temporal lobe's compromised. You have no problem with acquired skills but your long-term memory's as useful as a blind kid in a Where's Wally contest. If you see the Virgin Mary stood at the end of your bed? Don't think you're special. It's just another symptom."

With that, Chase almost, almost smiles.

"We learned at seminary school that most religious visitations are delusions; that it's only the righteous and pure that are led to see evidence of God's existence."

House remembers the kid, the spiritual kid with the STD. The preacher. The healer. The miracle-worker.

He remembers Chase's almost desperate desire to prove that God had won, on that occasion.

House won't go there. Not yet.

But, he will go here.

"God wants you to eat your jello, Chase," House says, as he forces the spoon into Chase's hand like a frustrated parent might. "You going to disappoint Him?"

And, Chase proves he's still the choirboy he always was when he awkwardly does his best to please.

(*)

There are flashes. Flashes of current memory interspersed with that which went before. It's overwhelming. It's…painful. At times, he doesn't know where he is and he panics and fights and tries to break free. Other times, he can't find words to say and is rendered silent. Struck dumb.

It's a frightening place to be; a terrifying state to find oneself in, yet House has ordered that he only be drugged if it's absolutely necessary; that he only be sedated as a last resort. His ICP has been stable for two days. His blood pressure is improving. His pulse is good and his temp is down.

"The medication's what's setting him back," House had said. "Drugs are bad. Just say No."

His doctor had agreed, seeing the link between the meds and Chase's sporadic deteriorations. House had told him not to question him again.

"I know my minions," he'd said, as if that alone gave him authority.

When Foreman comes to check on the patient's progress, a regular occurrence yet this first time he's been lucid and focused, Chase has the instant feeling of familiarity. He hears Foreman's voice before he speaks. Deep. Rich. Melodic.

He sees his passive expression before it reaches his face. It's non-specific but it's there.

"You know me, don't you?" Foreman says, when he reads that 'look' in Chase's eyes.

"I know that I know you," Chase replies, "but…I don't know you."

It makes sense, in some warped, illogical way. Chase knows when someone is a stranger to him; recognises when someone is new to him in a way that he doesn't recognise how the ties bind him to the people he does know.

It's a strange sense of de ja vu; of knowing something but not knowing it at all because those doors are still closed and Chase can't see what's behind them.

"Sometimes it comes back," Foreman tells him. "Your brain just has to heal."

He's quiet as Foreman talks at him, when he asks him how he's feeling, when he tells him he's glad he's awake.

"House tells me you're doing much better. That's good, Chase. That's really good. It's such a critical period, right now, but you're doing really well. I know it doesn't feel like it, but trust me."

Chase looks on quietly.

He's just trying to find something inside.

"We're not friends," he says, out of nowhere, and he seems bothered by his own assumption.

"Colleagues," Foreman replies. "We work together."

"You don't like me."

Weak voice. Small and frail, things that Chase has never been before. It unnerves Foreman as much as it 'hits' him hard.

It's just a sense. Just a feeling. Just a flickering, pulsating thought that crosses Chase's addled mind. It was true once but Foreman got to know the man behind the mask; got to peek inside and saw what Chase was hiding.

It was tough, realising he'd been wrong about him; that he'd given him a hard time because he simply chose to ignore the fact that Chase's life, in a lot of ways, had been just as difficult as his own.

Foreman presses buttons on screens, writes numbers down on the chart that lives at the foot of his bed.

Chase wonders if it's just an avoidance technique; a way of looking busy when he isn't.

"It's true, isn't it?"

He sounds so…young. Even his tone of voice is different. House told the tale of a just-past-adolescent Chase and Foreman couldn't even imagine it, but here it is.

Here it is, in all its raw, susceptible glory and he blanches when he thinks that Cameron will want to mother him and Thirteen will want to corrupt him with such sensual vigor that the poor kid won't know what's hit him.

Kid. He's never thought of Chase as a 'kid' before yet here it is.

There it is.

"I don't dislike you," Foreman says, finally. "We're just not…close."

"You think I'm a spoiled little rich boy who lives off Daddy's name, is that it?"

That's exactly it. Or, was. He's perceptive, for someone who at times lacks perception, surprisingly lucid for one who lacks lucidity at regular breaking intervals.

He looks at a speck; a crack in the wall. In this moment he looks weaker, sicker, more forlorn. More withdrawn.

In this moment, the loose gown swamps him. His body, it hangs on his soul like an ill-fitting, too-big garment, aged before its time.

"I don't think that. Not now," Foreman tries to say, but Chase doesn't want to hear it.

"It's okay. It's what everyone thinks."

He almost says 'it's what the kids at Med School think' but it doesn't feel right. It's hard. It's hard to place something in the past when it's so firmly in your present.

"I just live up to the expectation. Can't disappoint anyone then, can I?"

"Chase – "

Foreman tries to reach him but he's already gone, turned away, gathered up to himself as if how one might gather up a child.

His self-comfort is obvious. Blatant. It's hampered only by the medical equipment that's still limiting his movements, the monitoring devices that test for signs of life yet don't show the real readings whatsoever.


	2. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17**

_(Please note this is from Thirteen's POV – she's not going to be a huge character but she kind of wanted to take over, at this point, for a short spell!)_

(*)

She used to watch him.

She used to watch him with Cameron, wondering why on Earth God, destiny or fate brought such people together - Cameron, the moral, saccharine, upstanding citizen who craves the four kids, the fluffy dog and the white picket fence – and, Chase, the product of a rich, beautiful, elegantly broken home whose whole world is, was, a fenced-off, no-access point of no return.

She used to watch them, two blond, beautiful people with sun in their hair and light in their lives and she envied them. For awhile, she envied their perfection - their bona fide beauty and their perfect, perfect _everything_.

Chase was smart and Cameron was sweet and on the face if it they 'completed' each other.

Except they didn't.

It's human nature to search for flaws.

Thirteen would watch them in passing, borderline voyeuristic – the two of them with their beautiful smiles and their sunshine hair and their perfect genes that aren't broken, aren't damaged, aren't falling to pieces. How pretty their children would be, she thought. How they'd people the world with delightful blond children with their mother's feisty spirit and their father's hidden depth.

How sickeningly unfair it was that they were alive and that they found each other.

"Some people are just privileged," Foreman told her, wrapped up in her white Egyptian sheets but not in her love. "I'd put money on the fact that they're more cracked than you and I."

The black man with his bisexual lover.

The epitome of 'diverse'.

And, so she watched. She saw cracks in their perfect façade; saw how Chase would try to please House as Cameron played the do-gooder card and tried to wind him up. She saw how Chase would try to pacify Cameron whilst she just wanted to push forward.

She saw how his smile faded when she shot him a look, at times – how her eyes would cloud over when he disagreed with her.

Thirteen never believed they were in love. She doesn't know why they parted ways but she can't deny the 'freedom' of Chase since they did.

He sought solace in what he knew – or, what he didn't know but could've. He played cards with Taub; visited Spanish restaurants (in secret) with Wilson.

He saw a game with Foreman and, according to a man with so many upstanding basketball 'standards', actually held his own.

He tried, and failed, to find something to seek within House but it was with Thirteen that he was at his most exposed; Thirteen, who downed shots at his bachelor party; who licked the breasts of a slick, beautiful dancer as his charmingly intoxicated self applauded her.

She learned, not long after Cameron left, that there's a side to Chase that's both well hidden and completely invigorating; more liberal than his shirt-and-tie persona would ever betray.

He'd been an instant hit on the 'scene' that Thirteen frequents, that strobe-lit haven she often releases herself into. She'd been expecting shock. Passivity. Tense arms wrapped around a good-but-hidden body but he'd thrived as he sucked lemons; as he licked salt from his palm and swayed in time to the throbbing beats.

"I thought you'd be out of your depth," she'd said, as she enjoyed his company, surprised, indeed, that she did.

"I'm not so uptight," he'd smiled, as he ran his hands through that same blond hair Thirteen took such offence to before she knew him, a symbol of his All-Australian attractiveness. "I'm not all country clubs and bowls dinners, Remy."

There was something so revealing about the fact he called her by her name, out of work.

She called him Rob and it differentiated. It separated the 'work' from the 'play' and as Chase had tilted his head back as he received 'attention' from Cameron's friend, Amelie (she with the black, black hair and the dark, dark eyes so far removed from Cameron) she wondered if any of them knew him at all.

Thirteen tried to imagine Cameron with her wrists cuffed to the bed, indulging this side of her husband in tight black jeans and a shirt that had fallen open at some point; with hip bones that jut out against perfect-tan skin.

He'd looked up at her and his eyes had been electricity and joy, pure joy.

He was young and he was free and he was single and he was everything she thought he could never be.

"You're good when you let go," she'd said, as she knocked back something red and sticky that burned her throat as it went down.

He never knew that he could.

"We'll get you a pink boa for next time," she'd told him, "maybe a collar. Something studded. Something knockout."

Hence the dog.

Hence the toy that sat at his bedside as he slept through everything.

Their private joke from their private, platonic time.

(*)

She knows him.

She's been permitted beyond the sentinels Chase has carefully erected before. She realised, in those moments, that the Robert Chase of Princeton Plainsboro is a far cry from the Robert Chase of early evening when the shift card is stamped and the responsibility is placed on hold, for awhile.

She learned that Robert liked to lose control, liked to relinquish his rights, holding his hands up in supplication. He liked to place his life into someone else's hands because he figured they couldn't be worse at it than he is.

He was carefree, but he cared too much. He was smart, but he was naïve.

He held back – but, he loved too much.

She called him a contradiction of all things and he said it was half of his problem; that he never quite knew what he needed to be.

Sometimes, when the moment takes hold, Chase can be so…open.

He can give himself entirely.

Chase has no boundaries, in those moments. No restrictions. No carefully laid out areas of black and white. He exists within the grey always, colour drained, life placed in stone.

It was familiar, to Thirteen. She saw herself in his eyes; in the eyes of the rich boy who seemed to have the world at his feet yet in actual fact had to hold it up to stop it from crumbling.

When the sheen and the screens were pulled back, she saw her own sense of freedom and fear as she gazed into those oubliettes.

He could be so raw, at times. So full of pain.

"You think you know me," he'd said. "You think you've got me all figured out but you're wrong."

"I know you," Thirteen had replied. "I know you better than you think."

He spoke once of a banker girlfriend that liked to be burned – yet, Chase has been burned all his life.

Thirteen knows how that feels.

(*)

He has a thin, white scar on the inside of his right thigh. Thirteen hasn't seen it but he told her about it; told her how he'd bled livid red after a 'game' went wrong.

The woman's name had been Cassandra. There'd been a man, too, but he never told Thirteen any more than that only to state that it 'wasn't his thing.'

"I had stitches. Seventeen of them. Lost enough blood I needed a transfusion."

His grin had been proud as he'd laughed the word "Hardcore!"

The scar is the first thing she sees, six inches long, poking up out of the top of his plaster cast. It has a story, that scar. It's attributed to a memory that defines Chase, in a lot of ways that nobody would ever imagine he could be defined.

His leg will be scarred all over, now. It's held together by pins and rods whilst he's held together by threads that are bare and worn.

She smiles as his eyes blink open, sensing her presence.

They're the same oubliettes – only this time they're young. Vulnerable. They're wide-open and exposed.

He's exposed.

He becomes protective. Shy, almost.

She's never seen him shy.

"Do I know you?" he asks and, whilst she'd been told to expect the youth it's fascinating to see. It moves her. It shocks her.

He looks confused, as if he's searching for something he cannot quite see.

He doesn't look so perfect, now, with his bandaged head and his bruised face.

His eyes are still breathtaking, though.

"I know you," she replies. "I know you better than anyone."

In a way it's true. He 'let himself be', with Thirteen – let himself go in a way he never could, with others, because Thirteen's life is uncertain and Chase's life is unfulfilled.

They both have their secrets.

He stares at her, this beautiful woman, searches for her inside of himself. His first thought is to wonder if he's 'been with' her but it's not that. There's not that feeling, not that tie to a memory he can't quite access.

She sits down next to his bed and he feels instantly self-conscious. He pulls the sheets up close to him as if he's embarrassed. Ashamed.

At twenty, Chase wasn't comfortable with attractive women; wasn't comfortable with any women at all.

"Did House tell you I don't remember?"

He looks…intimidated.

She finds it enchanting.

"You'll remember," she smiles, and it's a knowing smile because Thirteen is a knowing woman, a beautiful woman, Chase thinks. A beautiful, dangerous woman. "I can help you remember."

It's not seductive, never could be, but Thirteen has a certain tone; a certain look, and anything could be construed as sexual.

She leans down and whispers in his ear, brushing her hand across his baby-bird scalp, touching where hair once was.

_She remembers his head pulled back, fingers entwined in his hair. She remembers his neck on show, pulse throbbing, as Amelie touched it, tasted it – as she left her mark where Cameron was too vanilla; left her name, where his own wife was too proud,_

_She remembers how he didn't flinch when bitten, simply melted into the invasion, eyes closed, breathing deep and even._

She touches his throat. It's a tangible cue, and he tenses up. His heart monitor shows an increase and for a second he's ashamed he's still hooked up to It; that this woman who he obviously knows has seen him in such a fragile state with tubes in his body and wires on his chest.

She touches his neck again and it flashes. It flashes before his eyes, this vision of himself with his head flung back and his body sheathed in sweat, laughing, laughing so freely as he's lapped and pawed and sucked and bitten.

He doesn't recognise himself.

The memory is there and then it's gone but Thirteen saw it; saw the recognition in his eyes. In his body. She saw the muscle memory as his head tilted back; as his face began to relax.

They say that recreating a moment can help jog a broken memory; that placing a person back in the same situation can help it become reality, once more.

She pulls her hand away when she has the required response but he won't let her.

He grabs her hand and it's swift and violent. She remembers House's voice in the back of her mind.

_Don't startle him. Don't wind him up. He's a curled up rattlesnake and he doesn't know how to keep his appendage in check. He doesn't bite but I think he might sting. _

"No," he says, but his voice is quiet and controlled, though it's still so very weak. "Wait."

She waits.

She doesn't move.

He stops at her wrist and she doesn't breathe.

"Here."

He turns it over gently, intently, as if he knows what's there, as if he remembers but he's working on instinct, here, and the memory is not a conscious one.

He sees those black letters in his mind's eye and when he traces them with his fingers it's tangible proof, to him, that his instincts are correct.

He knew about the tattoo; doesn't know how but he knew.

"Life," he whispers, repeating the word she said to him back when he saw it for the first time. "To remind you to keep on living it."

It breaks her, a little, the way that he remembers something so personal. So poignant.

"I got it when I was diagnosed," she replies. "But, you already know that, don't you?"

She touches his head gently. He looks so far away.

"Somewhere in there, you already knew."

He doesn't look up.

She stares at that wound in his head, knitted together by stitches and staples.

_His_ tattoo.

_His_ mark.

_His_ reminder to keep on living.

"Remy," he says, as if it's a word that's suddenly come to him, and it strikes her hard.

Stings her, like a rattlesnake might.


	3. Chapter 18

_Just a small part. I had started it last night but it all needed reformatting._ _Thanks to those that are still 'here' after my latest deletion. I feel bad for those that put the story on alert and if any of you return I do apologise!_ Part 18

He feels uncomfortable when he's alone.

He's never been this way. Even as a child he was content with his own company, more often than not playing alone in his bedroom whilst his parents drank wine in the study listening to music with no words.

He's never been this way, feeling the cold fear of the unknown – but things are different, now. Now, as he lies pinned to this bed with his leg in plaster and his arm immobile and that clear screen of window leaving him painfully exposed, he feels vulnerable when there's nobody here with him. He cannot move, cannot defend himself and often has no idea where he is but for the printed letters on the glass plate windows.

They told him he'll be moved from Intensive Care in coming days once the risk of infection is lessened and the threat of seizures minimised. He'll be on anti-convulsive medication for the long-term and he won't be able to drive for six months to a year, a preventative measure, but so far, so good. His scans have been improving and his vitals have remained stable. He's on antibiotics but they'll be withdrawn shortly and he'll be without some of the invasive additions that have hampered him so.

Perhaps then he'll feel less vulnerable; won't go running to the thought of Gregory House when the going gets tough and the world seems to overwhelm him.

Chase has grown used to falling asleep with House beside him and waking up with him dead to the world in the chair next to his bed. He woke up this morning alone for the first time and it scared him.

His mental dependence scared him.

"You didn't come by last night," Chase says, softly, and he doesn't expand upon the fact that he woke up tense and trembling; that the sight of an empty chair was enough to make him retch and vomit, humiliating himself in the process as they'd cleaned him up, careful to soothe but not to make him feel small.

He already feels small.

"I sent Thirteen," House says. "I've heard she's _tremendous _company."

"She's not you."

The words come out before his mind has time to process them. It's been happening a lot, this past few days. Unabashed. Unreserved. Anger. Betrayal.

Childish need.

_It's not the same._

He's the quintessential little boy pouting and stamping his feet because he didn't get what he wanted and that's not Chase, either. He's not scared. He's not vulnerable. He's not dependent, but he is.

House should've known he'd react badly. His routine was altered and he had no control over that. It's important for those with compromised mental capacity to rely upon a routine so that the unknown and unexpected can't panic them. Babies appreciate routine and will cry if it's altered. It's the same with the confused.

The truth was, House just needed to rest. His muscles are knotted and burned from sleeping in this chair. To say he'd slept like the dead would be lying, however. He'd called the ICU at 3am just to check that Chase was still alive. Still breathing.

He couldn't let go, his obsession chaotic, his care alien and unusual.

_She's not you_, Chase had said, stating House was irreplaceable.

"I'd like to think I'm prettier than her but yes, you're right, she's not me. Glad you made that observation, Chase. You clearly are getting better."

He tries not to show how much it worries him, Chase's growing dependence upon him.

Deeper still, he tries not to admit how it makes him feel necessary and required and important.

"When can I go home?"

"Still peeing into a plastic container but you want to go home. Right."

"They said I'm improving."

"Improving in that you can breathe on your own. It's a far cry from being ready to leave. Need I remind you you're brain damaged or is that just an unimportant detail?"

"I want to go home."

He's close to tears, emotions running wild and unchecked. House doesn't feel discomfort any more, just feels the need to reel him in.

"I want a Ferrari and a new leg but that's not going to happen. You know where you live? Tell me. What's your home address? Combination to your safe? I'm sure you've got any number of fascinating things in there. What's your phone number?"

It frustrates Chase that he doesn't know the answers. He looks helpless. Dazed.

"I-I don't-"

"Tell me, if you were to leave this room right now – where's the nearest exit? Where's the lift? What state are we in? What _year_ are we in, Chase? Do you even know that?"

The blinding fact is that Chase doesn't.

House doesn't hold back any punches when he tries to drum it home.

"Don't be so stupid. You're not going home. I'll chain you to be the bed, if I have to, and going on your known proclivities I guess you'd pretty much enjoy that."

Chase knows nothing of said proclivities.

He knows very little of himself at all.

"When people who can actually remember their own date of birth decide you're ready to leave you're not going home to be alone," House says finally. "I'll take you home myself before I'll let you do that. I wouldn't trust you not to mistake bathroom cleaner for mouthwash. Then where would we be?"

"I don't need a babysitter," Chase tries to argue, but the simple truth is that he needs that.

He needs that and more.

"There's a movie on TV tonight that I want to see," House says, when all becomes quiet. "I don't have cable at home. You're not using the TV and you're quiet enough that you won't disturb me."

It's his way of saying "I'll be back."

It's his way of saying, "I won't leave you alone again, tonight."

Chase nods his head, tries not to let House see just what a weight off his shoulders that is.


	4. Chapter 19

Another little chapter whilst I'm Home Alone for a few days.

Thank you for those of you that 'sought me out'. I hope I am not boring you to death too much

**Part 19**

It's like rising again.

Chase enjoys his spontaneous freedom as he's permitted out of that bed for the very first time, albeit in a wheelchair because his leg is immobile and his arm doesn't work and he his body is too weak to support him.

When the IV tubing is removed from his wrist it's like the cutting of an umbilical chord, capped off for future use yet discarded for his moment of rebirth.

As the oxygen cannula is removed from his face he breathes air for the first time.

He doesn't cry, though. Not today. He doesn't scream like a newborn might.

He's born into this strange new world with the aid of a porter who calls him 'Rob' and 'man' and 'pal' as if they're close but Chase doesn't feel close to him, doesn't' feel anything for him at all.

"You remember me, don't you? How could anyone forget such a guy as me."

He doesn't recognise the tattoo peeping up over his shirt-top in the same way he recognised Thirteen's and the man's face is blank and nondescript.

"I'm sorry," he says, quietly, and his face is helpless; pleading for forgiveness.

Chase sees a look flash in the porter's eyes. Hurt, perhaps, at the fact that Chase doesn't remember him but all he can do is apologise and tell the guy it's nothing personal.

"I might not even recognise my father if he walked through the doors," he says, softly, "not that it's likely…"

"Your old man, huh?"

It's a sore subject. He still doesn't know that his father's dead because House has forbidden anyone from telling him, as if the responsibility is his alone.

House has taken on a lot of responsibilities, when it comes to Chase, most of which are not his responsibility at all – are beneath and beyond the call of duty.

"Yeah, well," the porter continues, "you've had plenty of visitors that I've seen."

He shrugs his shoulders nonchalantly.

"Fuck your old man."

He places a blanket over Chase's legs, makes a point of ensuring his comfort before he takes him away.

He fumbles, slightly, and it makes Chase feel uncomfortable.

"You okay, buddy?" the porter asks, and he speaks to him as if he were a child.

Chase nods, but he feels anger at being patronised. It's a struggle to hold it back as he grips the side of that chair with his one good hand, bites his lip hard to balance it out.

He takes a deep breath but he doesn't feel the air going into his lungs and his first thought is that the dots in front of his eyes might be lack of oxygen.

His head spins suddenly but he closes his eyes because denial is the perfect option, right now.

His body had ached when he'd been lifted from his bed, removed, albeit temporarily, from the medical marvels that have become a part of him. He didn't admit it, hid the pain like his damaged brain hides parts of Robert Chase from him because he can have his secrets, too. He hates the susceptibility because he's always prided himself on his independence, a 'trait' that has gone so far out of the window it might as well have blown away.

Beggars can't be choosers, though, and for so long he's been pleading for some time out; for a change from the four walls of the room they say he'll be vacating at some point today.

He feels instantly light as he emerges, as if he's climbing, likens it to escalating from the grave; ascending into Heaven.

His body gasps when the expanse of an open hospital is laid out before him because until now, his universe has been that room; his own dreams and, on occasion, an MRI machine that he slept within time and time again.

It's overwhelming, in a lot of ways, that this is 'home' when it feels like nothing of the sort.

That the only thing that feels like 'home' at all, in this place, is a man with a bum leg and a sharp mouth who speaks to him as if he hates him yet gives a damn, all at once.

It's a mind-numbing contradiction.

Necessary friction.

(*)

He drinks in the nooks and crannies of each and every corridor as if he may never see them again. His brain functions on a very immediate level, as if at any moment in time this could all be taken from him so he attempts to preserve what he sees as fully and as completely as he can.

He can't count how many times he's woken up with his acquired knowledge stolen from him, plucked back into the obscurity of his own fragmented mind.

He's trying to maintain some kind of grasp on things that keep slipping away…

The woman with the black hair stops the porter and asks where they're headed. Chase knows her name is Dr Cuddy but she insisted he call her 'Lisa' and when she looks at him it's as if she cares deeply yet doesn't know how to express it.

It's maternal, almost, reminds him of how a mother would look at a child.

He feels no 'tie' to her at all and wonders if he holds her at arm's length…

Her azure eyes look down on him. He tries not to feel inadequate because her smile is warm and her presence has been a welcome comfort, in those lonely moments without House.

"I bet you're glad to be out of that room," she says, grateful in herself that he's well enough to be off 24 hour monitoring; that his condition is improving, as such.

He doesn't look like Chase, though. The brittle confidence isn't there, nor is the tentative self-assurance.

He just looks…haunted. Archetypal confused.

"House told me cabin fever had been setting in."

Chase nods his head.

She doesn't take issue with the fact that he hasn't said a word because his language skills are as unpredictable as his moods and he can range from highly verbal to monosyllabic. It correlates with his tiredness and pain levels but this morning he stated he wanted to 'feel' and so he refused his medication, hoping it would make him sharper.

He learned that from House and they objected but didn't refuse because it's his right to choose.

He's feeling it, now.

Cuddy stares at him as if she's attempting to make a diagnosis but his condition is obvious and visible. She swallows hard, trying not to remember the man he was, knowing full well that man might not exist any more.

She tries not to let her heart break for what he might never succeed to be.

He just stares at her.

"Well," she smiles, but it's strained. "I hope you make the most of your time out. It's not Taj Mahal but there's plenty to see, here. I'm sure House will want to keep you entertained while you're awake."

"Yeah…"

He'll pick himself up for House. Cuddy already knows that. She's watched him grow from boneless to alert the minute he laid eyes upon a man she's so terrified will hurt him yet who surprises her daily.

He claims that Chase is 'brainlessly entertaining' in the same way that Spongebob is; that it's fun to tell him the same story three times over just to see if he remembers the first time.

Cuddy knows it's more than that.

It's so much more than that.

(*)

He completes the team.

He's wheeled in to their haven, their den, their enigmatic dungeon of diagnostics and it's as if he's never been away.

There's room for him at the table.

There'll always be room for him at the table.

"I thought since you were already here," House explains, "that we might as well see if you can be of any use to us. I figured Sally Jessy Raphael re-runs might be getting old, now, so I sprung you for an hour or so. You think you can handle the pace, little boy?"

He's wearing a pair of jeans and a Rolling Stones t-shirt. It's casual. Comforting, in a sense.

Chase nods his head because the words still aren't coming thick and fast, at present, and the pressure that he's feeling behind his eyes is taking up a whole lot of his energy.

He tries his best to ignore it because he's here, with House, and House wants him to be here. Asked for him to be here.

The room is as open as his own room is but the view, here, is nicer. There are trees outside of the window, branches reaching out almost as if to touch it and it's relaxing, Chase thinks. The smell of coffee teases him, tantalises his senses and makes him long for something he cannot have because caffeine can mess with the brain's chemistry and his own brain chemistry is messed up enough as it is.

He looks a little nervous, shifting the best he can under the renewed scrutiny. He's like a kid suddenly removed from its mother and left to face the big, wide world without her support.

He suddenly feels…overwhelmed, when 'Remy' tells him "Welcome back".

He swallows. Gulps.

"I-I don't think I…"

_I don't think I should be here._

House can see his apprehension.

"Oh, don't worry. We've got a big black dude on standby if you get into trouble. He's a _neurologist,_ you know, as well as a car thief? Who'd have thought such worlds would ever collide?"

It's no coincidence that Chase was placed next to Foreman; that he'll still be under necessary observation even when he's been given 'freedom'.

Foreman will check his eyes for signs; for symptoms of possible dissociation or absence seizure; for signs of a deterioration that requires urgent care.

House just wants to give the boy a taste of how his life once was; to see whether or not he wants to return to it.

"You're just here to observe," House tells him, "to watch a master and his minions at work. There's nothing to be nervous about."

Foreman interjects, albeit subtly. Gently.

"If something comes to mind, don't be afraid to say it. If we're affecting a diagnosis and something sounds right to you, by all means say something. You might find that you put things together and it fits."

Chase can't imagine anything coming to mind, at this moment.

His mind is completely blank and inundated.

His eyes move to Thirteen and she's smiling at him. Her own eyes reflect her concern and encouragement but she won't voice either.

She isn't the type…

The other man is silent. Taub. He doesn't even look at Chase.

Chase likes that.

(*)

They talk so fast. They fire off ideas as if they're heads are encyclopedias, so much information stored in such a small surface area.

He wonders how he ever did this.

He wonders how he was ever as good as they are; as knowledgeable. As efficient.

Chase lacked confidence as a young man; lacks it now.

(*)

He tries to keep up.

He tries to keep up with words thrown around, diagnoses made and documented in black ink on a white board.

He tries to remember what auto-immune is; what the symptoms of sarcoidosis might be and the side-effects of propofol sedation might entail.

He tries his best to keep his thoughts on track but he's starting to lose it to the pain he thought would help him and it's making it difficult to stay 'with it'.

House is discrete when he whispers in Chase's ear; when he asks "Are you okay?"

He touches a hand against his neck to check his pulse whilst the others are arguing over the benefits of broad spectrum antibiotics in a patient that's shown resistance in the past.

"A little fast," House notes, "but, nothing to worry about. Are you in pain?"

Chase nods his head, closes his eyes as he takes a deep breath, as he absently reaches his hand up behind him to touch House's arm.

It steadies him, the physical contact, even if it stills House completely.

It grounds him in this reality, as surreal and intimidating as it is.

His pulse slows down, ever so slightly, but his hands are shaking.

"Pain helps you focus," Chase repeats, as if it's a mantra that makes sense, as if they're words that mean everything. "You said."

"Don't listen to me," House replies, and he instantly feels guilty about saying those words at all because Chase can be so literal, of late, and he trusts so implicity that everything is taken at face value. "Nobody ever listens to me. I'm a junkie genius, remember? Vicodin is my friend."

Pain helps me focus, he'd said, keeps me sharp and fresh.

He'd been being sarcastic…

House touches his hand to the side of Chase's head; puts pressure beneath the bandage that holds it all together.

It relieves the pressure elsewhere and Chase's tension releases itself, somewhat.

He leans back, thankful, grateful.

He rests the back of his head on the man that's stood behind him.

"Too much too soon," House says, quietly, and then admits "I'm as much of an idiot half-wit as you are."

It's only now that they notice, the others, the minions, only now that they see this unexpected show of gentleness and concern from an otherwise stone-hard man.

He's cradling Chase's head. Chase looks absent, lost to his own suffering.

It's Foreman that feels the brunt; that's left hanging on the receiving end of his sharp tongue.

"You were supposed to be observing," he says, and his tone is accusatory and benevolent. "What kind of a neurologist are you when you can't see that someone's masking pain?"

"I was attempting to diagnose a patient, House. It was your idea to bring him here in the first place when he's clearly not ready. We told you we didn't want to be held responsible if something went wrong with him."

It's striking. Scything. It's not meant the way that it sounds but it still cuts deep. Chase would tell him to fuck off and drop dead, if his mind wasn't elsewhere…

"Just…do your job, Foreman."

Foreman shines lights in Chase's eyes and Thirteen hands him a glass of water that he drops to the ground; that smashes on the floor because his hand is shaking too badly to hold it.

Taub is preparing an injection that'll soften him and send the pain away, removes the stopper from the catheter in Chase's hand and the drug burns up his arm until it reaches his shoulder. His chest. His legs. His body and mind.

The pain subsides, but it's House's hands that are helping, he'd swear, those rhythmic, pulsing motions of pressure that he places in the very right place at the very right times.

"First lesson in House Rules," Foreman states, sternly. "Don't get personally involved when treating a patient. Isn't that what you told us?"

"Chase isn't a patient."

"No? The ID bracelet on his wrist says otherwise. I was a patient too, once. Remember? I didn't see you sleeping in the chair next to my bed."

"Oh, so this Foreman being jealous that Daddy didn't give him enough attention and that little Chase is getting all the love? Is that what this is about?"

"You know full well that's not what this is about. It's about you doing your job and not messing with his life."

There's nothing House can say to that. There's nothing Thirteen can say other than "cool it," and "keep your voices down."

There's nothing Taub can do but sit down with his face in patient papers because he's nothing to say.

"You're risking his life because of some misguided sense of duty, House, because of this need to push him and make him right, but you can't make him right."

"I can try."

He can try.

He can try, because Chase has fallen into him, now, and the only times he's shown any inkling of improvement is when House has been with him.

He can try, because Chase is one of the smartest doctors he's ever met and despite the obvious differences he's always seen himself in the sad, broken wretch that so desperately wanted his approval.

For so many years, that's all House wanted – until his pain made him bitter and his bad luck made him twisted and the world became something to twist and manipulate, to him, as well as those within it.

There's nothing he can do to reel in Foreman's anger at the perceived notion he's putting Chase's life at risk.

He throws House's words back at him when he says "Do your job".

There's nothing he can say to that because professionalism went out of the window, when he emerged from that cement grave with Chase.

He looks down at him, now, still conscious but serene, now.

Part of him wants to hold his hand over the boy's face; to suffocate him and damage him and punish him for bringing out this unnerving, devastating concern because House doesn't give a shit and he's always prided himself upon that fact.

The other part, the part that's been stunted and suppressed for years, just wants to embrace him for it.

He touches the side of Chase's face.

"You shouldn't listen to me," he says, a repeat of what was said before.

"I trust you," Chase replies, his voice so far away.

"You're idolising the wrong man."

A false prophet.

A counterfeit God.


	5. Chapter 20

**Part 20 **

_Just a brief interlude. I hope is not terrible. I certain feel like I am overloading, of late, because my mind goes racing and I feel I need to write stuff. I'm sorry if I am. I probably lost the plot about ten chapters back but I'm amusing myself, if nothing else.  
_

Wilson sips a diet coke because he's the designated driver, is always the designated driver, just like he's always the designated 'best friend' and shoulder to cry on.

At the end of High School, his yearbook picture labelled him "Every Girl's Best Friend" and it was true. He's lived his life as someone's crutch, had to suffer the indignity of becoming the 'best friend' of every woman he ever loved because he has this way about him that makes him a wonderful bearer of bad tidings but a terrible, if loveable husband.

It's why he couldn't stay faithful, because there always came a time when the partners in his life no longer saw him as a husband and lover but as a steady rock, forever strong, forever reliable yet no longer a challenge.

Wilson provides little resistance to anybody. Its useful for House, who lives his life only to use people.

House's yearbook labelled him "Most likely to steal your cigarette" and that's telling enough, as it is.

The bar is dark-lit. There's a pool table in the corner and a jukebox that seemingly plays nothing but Elvis. Wilson orders 'chicken fried steak' which House picks at shamelessly, leaving him with only the side salad and a few herb potatoes for his troubles.

Wilson doesn't argue, just thanks House, sarcastic yet passive, for leaving the 'best parts'.

They've been coming to this place for a long time but haven't been in awhile. For awhile they've been…drifting apart. Wilson revisited a girl. House, he disapproved. Wilson moved said girl in – and she pissed on House's territory.

He's been bitter about it for weeks.

"So, why the sudden date? Did that beautiful blonde harlot of yours let you down, last minute, and you were short of things to do?"

Wilson doesn't react, never reacts. He chooses his battles carefully and only then, he'll only choose the ones he knows he can win.

"She's at home watching a movie."

"Yeah, I'll bet she is."

Wilson doesn't sigh but he often carries a weight on his shoulders; has a certain downtrodden 'charm'. It's what helps the patients relate to him, his haplessness and his soft-spoken compassion.

House doesn't value compassion, nor does he welcome it freely.

He's suspicious of Wilson, today.

"Tell me what you're after. I'm _dying_ to know."

"I just thought you needed a break. Forgive me for being a friend."

"You're forgiven. Stupid, but forgiven."

House sips his beer slowly, as if he doesn't want to ingest, as if he doesn't want the affects. It's telling, to Wilson, because they've been here twenty-six minutes and he'd normally be on his third drink by now. He wonders at times if years of Vicodin abuse gave him an immunity to alcohol, in some ways, because House can drink him under the table and it's nothing to do with weight or experience.

Tonight - tonight feels…different. He can't hide the suspicion in his face. It's etched there visibly because Wilson's never been adept at hiding his feelings. House keeps his prisoner, barricaded inside. Wilson wears his like a badge of honour.

"You not drinking your beer?"

House brings it to his lips and swallows a mouthful.

"Are you the Drink Police, now? What do_ you_ think?"

He's not going to make this easy, though he knows what Wilson is looking for. Wilson can see it, can see the knowledge in his eyes, the deliberate avoidance of that which Wilson wants, _needs_, to know.

Wilson is a curious man and he's so utterly determined to see good in House that he'll do anything to draw that out. House almost feels sorry for him, as if he's the leprechaun chasing gold at the end of a rainbow.

House certainly isn't gold.

He counts from one to ten in his head, estimates he'll reach seven before Wilson gives in, always does, always will – a man of habit. A man of repetition.

_Four…five….six…._

_And, begin. _

"Is this whole…act…some kind of elaborate ruse? Is Chase just another puzzle to you? I don't understand. Seriously, what are you getting out of this?"

House takes a further sip. He swills it around his mouth, savouring the flavour whilst keeping Wilson waiting. There's no reason for it, other than that it's part of their dynamic and always has been.

"Other than his charming company and his wit?"

"I'm serious."

"So am I. He's a funny guy. He doesn't even know who Miley Cyrus is."

Wilson's been wracking his brains for the answer, for some clue as to why House has suddenly taken an interest in a kid that's been broken for years; that's had 'help me' tattooed on his forehead for as long as Wilson has known him.

He's desperate to know what changed, whether that time alone with Chase that everyone commends him for altered him, in some way. He has this beautiful, romantic notion that House might've seen the light, in some way; that he might've opened himself up to the possibility of acting like a normal human being, for once.

"Your attention span for sick people is about three and a half minutes, unless you get something out of them."

"Whereas yours is everlasting. You'll even resort to sleeping with them, being the martyr and the vulnerability whore that you are. Which reminds me. Could you donate half of your brain? I'm sure you won't miss it."

He's deflecting.

Wilson won't let him. He'll poke and prod the anomaly that is his best friend until he reaches a conclusion because rare events are worthy of investigation and this is as rare as a solar eclipse. House, the moon. Chase, the sun.

The son.

"What are you getting out of Chase? You're just _oozing_ gratification. What is it that spending your every waking hour with him is giving you?"

It sounds perverted. Perverse, the idea that one could 'get' something out of a person who 'gets' nothing out of themselves. The truth of the matter is, Wilson can tolerate House playing with strangers for his own gain…but, not friends.

He needs to know there's something more.

"He laughs at my jokes. He believes every word I tell him. He does everything I ask him to do."

"He's always been a kiss-ass. Now he's a brain damaged kiss-ass, which is two strikes against. What gives?"

"He thinks I'm _cool_."

"No. That's not it. What is it about him that's got you so wrapped up? You haven't been back to the apartment in days."

"I was there the other night…"

"One night in how long? Nine days? Ten days? Let me put it another way. One day since it happened."

He's pushing.

Pushing.

He's always pushing…

"For the love of God, Wilson, do you think me incapable of humanity?"

Spoken with true, Housespearean dramatics. With sarcasm. With a voice so shrill it almost breaks the windows. He's acting…but, there's something else.

Wilson sees it. Pounces upon it. The weakly suppressed smile is that of a scientist that's just made a breakthrough.

In a sense, it's what he is. He notes how House drinks a little faster, now, as if it's fuelling him. At first he wanted to remain sober, to keep his wits about him. Now, he's just looking for an escape.

"You're getting off on him needing you, aren't you? That's it, isn't it?"

"You're the emotional vampire, not me."

"He's actually making you feel _good_ about yourself."

"I always feel good about myself. I don't need some mentally deficient kangaroo Oliver Twist to give me the warm and fuzzies."

"No, no, no. I'm right, aren't I?"

Wilson feels he's solved the mystery; that the answer he sought was nothing more than common sense and human nature.

That people seek people who make them feel good about themselves, are magnetised and drawn towards those that trigger and emotional or egotistical response.

Wilson knows he's getting somewhere when House begins to tear up his napkin; when he starts pulling little corners off and rolling them into little balls; little balls that will, in turn, become ammunition against this – this character assassination.

He'll 'load' a straw; will fire them in Wilson's direction like cannonballs.

He'll spit them at Wilson whilst Wilson spits out the truth.

Wilson laughs. It's a knowing laugh. House wants to wipe the smile from Wilson's lips; wants to tear that look of smugness away from his features.

Instead, he just insults him, as is customary.

"You've been spending too much time reading all of those Mills and Boon novels your _dozen_ ex-wives left behind after the divorce settlements. All of these romantic notions of love and care and affection in poor old Wilson's head. I don't 'do' sympathy. I just value interesting things."

Another drink. Another shrug.

Another lie…

"Chase is just…an interesting thing."

Wilson doesn't play up to the machismo, simply lets it continue to spill from defensive, untruthful lips – little white lies born into the world out of some misguided attempt at self-preservation.

"I feel like I've stepped into some alternate reality where you're actually a good guy."

"Oh, come on, Wilson. You know that's never going to happen. I'm the Knight of my own Misery. He's just…something to focus my mind on."

"There's nothing wrong with it, House. It's nothing to be ashamed of."

"There's nothing to be ashamed of because you're wrong."

"You care about him."

Care. A four letter word.

Spoken like a challenge, not a statement.

House curls his nose up in disgust at the possibility of that word applying to him but Wilson knows he's won when he offers no witty response; no clever comeback.

Wilson leans back.

He stares at House as if drinking him in; as if memorising this moment for future contemplation.

"You care," he says, satisfied, content.

House's discomfort with that fact is devastatingly obvious.


	6. Chapter 21

**Part 21 **

**(*)**

The air is tepid. The sky, it's grey and overcast.

The smile, however, is brighter than any Summer's day and it makes the morning feel ten degrees warmer.

Chase welcomes the outdoors with the beatific delight of one who has not experienced it for a long, long time. He used to enjoy the grand old cliché of feeling the wind in his hair but that's gone, now, the sensation taken away by the hacking and slicing of his head to save his life.

With the pain gone, he just wanted 'out'. Tired of the ongoing cycle of air-con, he wanted something fresh, wanted to remember what the environment smelt like and how the sky looked outside of darkened windows.

"Remy said she'd take me outside but she got called away," Chase had said, sadly, hopefully, when House came to bring him something to read. He figured Hustler and Empire Magazine were 'enough' for Chase then spent five minutes sat in 'his' chair flicking through the pages.

He'd caught the hint only when Chase repeated it, played it out again with more urgency, more need.

"I've been in this building for so long I've forgotten how it feels to be out. I guess it was urgent, wherever she had to be."

So sad, he sounded. So…pathetic.

House had thrown the magazine down as if frustrated, as if 'hard done by' and harassed – told Chase "Enough, already, I'll put on your leash and walk you if you stop begging."

"I don't beg," Chase had replied, embarrassed - shy, almost. Then he'd smiled, equally hopefully, had tilted his head like an imploring child. "I can ask nicely, though."

(*)

"Traffic noise," House chirps up, as he walks beside Chase's chair, a chair that's pushed by a man that graciously doesn't listen, by a man whose only job is to transport. "Smog. The scent of smoke and gasoline. Such a beautiful world out here."

"Remy said there were gardens…"

"_Thirteen_ is an idealist as well as a lesbian. There's a bench and a few trees. It's hardly a garden."

"Still, I'd like to experience the smoke on my face, the scent of gasoline in my lungs…"

"Well, if you insist, but don't be expecting utopia."

"I don't expect anything."

House gives him what he wants because he wants it, too, cooped up for too long on clinic duty because the stream of patients that might be of interest to him has dried up, this past few days, and his 'team' are left filling in the time. Taub's giving a consultation to one of Wilson's cancer patients about a reconstruction. House swears he takes pleasure in taking a black marker to a woman's breasts as an outline for his surgical masterpiece.

He's surprised Foreman hasn't been hanging around Chase out of professional interest, figures that his own constant presence has frightened the tough guy away.

House, the sentinel.

The guardian, acting like "Chase's father," he'd said, to which House enquired as to when he perfected the art of becoming invisible?

It's nice, to Chase, this cool breeze over skin that feels sensitive and overheated. The bandages are gone, medusa-like drains cast aside, and now there's only a thick white square taped in place to protect the wound.

His hair will cover the scar. It'll mask the 'tattoo'. Nobody will ever know that a piece of his head is missing, replaced by metal that's screwed into place. In time, they won't know that anything is different about him at all.

He's already different, though. House can see it. Sense it. He can see the change in his employee; a change that might never reverse itself. Be it a good change or a bad change, that's not yet clear, but he's not the same as he was.

"What did I used to be like?" he asks, out of the blue, and the only thing House can tell him is "You were different."

Chase gives him one of those smiles; those smiles that ask for more, those smiles that ask for something more substantial than that which he already knows.

Under his breath House calls him a 'pretty boy' and Chase laughs out loud.

"That, for example. That's different. It's new."

"What, I never laughed?"

"I thought maybe you'd had a sense of humour extraction, at times, but you had your moments."

He rarely showed happiness before, as if that action was too extrovert, as if showing blatant happiness was 'not permitted' because it revealed too much of him.

"Funny," Chase admits. "My girlfriend used to say I had a warped sense of humour."

His girlfriend.

It sounds…strange…hearing Chase refer to a girlfriend.

Again, he laughs, only this time it's edged with confusion, as if he doesn't know what's funny any more. He does it a lot, now, will throw his head back and laugh so freely and so unabashed that it stops House in his tracks.

"Yeah, you're different."

Gone are the shackles that held him back. Forgotten, for now, are the life experiences that piled up upon him and ground him down into the dirt.

This is the Chase that he should've been. Before the disappointments. Before the pain.

Before the murder and the divorce and the discontent…

This is the Chase he would've been if life hadn't fucked him over time and time again; ruined him before he was even thirty.

"Over here," House indicates, and their 'chaperone' takes a detour, because House is a 'genius' but he can't push a grown man in a wheelchair with his own bum leg in the way. "Over here is your Garden of Eden."

House, unable to handle the 'dirty work' himself, has the orderly park Chase in a nice spot next to a bench. Picturesque, he says, and with a good view of…well, nature.

Chase is unable to contain the comment that's bursting around his lips.

"This is the garden?" he asks, as he looks around, and it's not disappointment but amusement because it's not a 'garden' at all, more a corner of the world that's greener than the rest of it.

"She paints a pretty picture," House comments, of Thirteen, then taps his head with a look on his face that's a combination of conspiracy and pity, "but, there's not a lot up here."

Chase smiles, and there's genuine humour, there.

"Just like me then, hey?"

At least he can laugh at himself.

House never thought of Chase as self-deprecating…

"Yeah, just like you."

(*)

It's a peaceful place, this.

It's a peaceful place, but somehow House manages to destroy the quiet as he pulls apart leaves having fallen from a tree and casting the dismembered remnants down onto the ground.

He makes circles in the ground with his 'good' foot as his 'bad' leg simply exists at the end of his body, unwanted, unloved.

He notes that Chase is quiet but stress-free; that he's holding back the occasional, uncontrollable anger well, now that the swelling is subsiding.

They say that the open air often does wonders for patients who are slipping, a little.

Chase asks what his father thinks of all this.

"Does he even care or am I interrupting his bowling club get-togethers?"

He's head injured, knows he's considered mentally incapable for any life-altering decisions, knows he couldn't consent to the surgeries he's been subjected to.

His father took over the decision-making role when his mother lost the plot. Chase remembers being fifteen, falling off his surfboard. His wrist was broken, needed pinning, and his father was nowhere to be seen.

When Rowan Chase finally arrived he treated him as a patient, not a son, insisted on him calling him 'Doctor', not father.

He'd probably do the same now.

"I was critical for a few days. Did he even call? I know he didn't visit."

He says is dismissively, as if he's trying hard not to show how much it hurts. House understands the cutting absence of paternal affection. He knows the constant need to get something, anything, out of dear old dad.

He also understands it's better for Chase to hear that it's because his father _can't _be here, not because he won't.

His words are blunt.

Chase is ready to hear this, now, he knows, and whilst it might crack him down the middle it's the right time.

"Your Dad's dead, Chase. Cancer. He didn't call then, either."

Such a sticking point, in Chase's life. Such a turning point, House believes, because he became so hardened, after that. Cold, in a lot of ways.

He expects the kid to react stoically, to pretend to be fine. He expects poorly hidden tears and a sudden bout of tiredness, a need for solitude.

On the other hand, he expects anger. Rage. Twisting pain and torn stitches because this Chase is not _his_ Chase and he doesn't know how he'd react to this at all.

Instead, Chase just looks... relieved.

Relieved because he knew. Deep down, he just knew, and his smile reflects that.

It confuses House. It's not the natural order of things.

It's now how it should be.

"I just told you Papa's not preaching any more and all you can do is smile?"

"I knew. I knew he was dead. Deep down, I knew. I just wanted to hear _you_ tell me, not her."

He kept on hearing her voice in his head. Your dad's dead. He's gone.

He kept on hearing the 'news' over and over every time his father's face sprang to mind.

He replaces that memory with this one and it heals it.

"My Dad died to me a long time ago. This changes nothing."

But, it does change something.

He asks who his guardian angel is; what creature on this earth has sanction over his life or death. House figures he might as well deal Chase a full hand, now that the floodgates are open.

"Your 'guardian angel' is the soon to be ex Mrs Chase, although you might want to rethink that. The only proxy that interests her is of the Munchausen variety"

"I have a wife?"

"Had. The operative word is 'ex', Chase."

The thought unnerves him, doesn't feel old enough or mature enough for marriage, doesn't feel steady or stable enough to tie the knot with someone for what is supposed to be forever.

He's still hung up on Anne, that teenage girlfriend of yesteryear that seems like the last person he ever loved deeply…

The only person he ever loved deeply…

"A wife…"

He has no memory of her, doesn't know why that is. He has no memory of her…and, it scares him.

"I had no idea. I've been getting…thoughts…but, not this one. Not a wife."

Incredulous, he asks "_Married?"_

The only experience he has of marriage is a broken home, vowed a long time ago that he'd never put anyone through the strain of trying to hold onto love that was long lost, perhaps never existed to begin with.

He couldn't possibly have been a decent husband, based on his role-models…

"Her name was Cameron," House tells him. "Obviously, she went for me first but settled for you when I blew her off."

"Was she pretty?"

"If you like the Laura Ingalls look, yeah."

He watches carefully as Chase wracks his brain trying to find a trace but there is none.

Cameron isn't in there.

"Do you know why we broke up?"

_The biggest sin of all. Not adultery. _

_That card is too big to be turned over, just yet._

Chase wonders if he pushed her away like he always does. His only experience of marriage is a loveless one.

Houses response is simple. Honest, to a point.

"You didn't have an expiry date. She was more fond of in sickness than in health."

Yes. Right.

(*)

He's quiet for awhile, as if taking it all in. Dead father. Absent wife.

A life, spread out before him, that he doesn't remember living.

His mood seems…sombre, but House doesn't question it.

He'll allow him his moods without psychoanalysing; will give him his moment without putting it down to a 'symptom'.

House throws himself onto that wooden bench and stretches his leg out. Chase is no longer distant, is more in touch with the world around him, these days. He's observant, House finds, though his observations are more emotional than clinical.

"Pain?" he asks, as House rubs absently at his leg, an act he normally reserves for his own solitude.

"No," he replies, sarcastically, "it's like a thousand tiny butterflies are dancing on my skin."

Chase nods at that, accepts the explanation.

"Right."

At times, he'll take that comment literally. His consciousness, it flits and floats. Right now, in this clear lucidity, he sees it for what it is.

A deflective response.

A way of over-compensating.

He doesn't smile because his mind is going to a place that perhaps it shouldn't go, right now, but this new-found peace and freedom is taking him into himself and it's an enlightening experience, if not a pleasant one. They all keep telling Chase to relax into himself…but, the only place he's going, right now, is back to that living room where he found his mother face down in her own mortality.

"You hide it well. My mum used to do the same before – "

He pauses. His voice trails off because, at 20, he hadn't yet learned how to detach himself. He's a young man ashamed of what his mother became, but House won't let him sink.

"Before what?"

He won't let him back off because too many people allowed that and it turned Chase into something insular; something brimming and waiting to explode.

It turned him into someone who will hit another man just to stop people from trying to get close to him; to stop people from trying to see inside because he'd rather be seen as violent than in pain.

House pushes. Repeats.

"Before what, Chase? Before she got so hammered she forgot to erect the walls around herself? Before it all became too much and she hit the booze?"

Chase, distant, shrugs.

"You depend on the pills to escape the pain in your leg, she depended on vodka to escape the pain of her life. She never asked for help and neither do you. It's not so different. It's all about hiding the obvious."

It bothers House, to be analysed in this manner; to be tarnished with the same destructive brush that Chase's mother has been painted with.

He promised not to go easy on the kid, swore that he'd treat him as a human being, rather than a porcelain doll.

"When did you become a psychologist, Chase? When did you get so _smart_?"

The boy shrugs.

Remains silent.

"And, what about you? You think you're so tough you can handle a fractured skull, a broken leg and a gimp arm without even an Advil? You think you can hide that kind of pain without asking?"

"I think that I'm confused enough as it is without sleeping my way through the day just so I don't have to feel anything. I don't want to depend on that stuff. I can help myself."

He'd rather feel pain than incompletion; would rather feel agony than feel nothing at all.

"We're not forcing heroin into your veins, Chase. We're not turning you into a wino or a junkie..."

"My mother drank herself into a coma to escape life," he says, and his voice is soft, his eyes staring out across the grass and the pathway. "Her pain was too difficult for her to stand."

His mouth becomes rigid.

Stoic.

"I'd rather feel mine. That way, at least I know I'm alive."

His mother died a long time before her heart stopped beating.

Chase will never let himself get that way.

"You should give up the pills," he tells House, though he doesn't look at him when he says it.

"Embrace the pain, right? I was being sarcastic when I said that, Chase."

"It wasn't bad advice."

When Chase looks at him, now, his eyes are glazed. Unfocused.

His words are cutting. Intense.

"One day you simply won't wake up. You'll be pain-free and it'll be great. The only problem is, you'll be dead. You'll be dead because those little white friends of yours might give you a moment's peace but pretty soon they won't be enough any more."

He looks away. His voice becomes a sigh that flies free on the wind.

"You'll be dead and I'll be alone. You're an addict, just like her."

The words, they come from nowhere. He doesn't even hold back.

Because, that was Chase's biggest fear, before he came to terms with the fact that everybody leaves him.

Being alone.

Being left behind.

When he looks back at House, now, it's with the cracking emotion of someone who is terrified. House didn't realise Chase's abandonment issues ran so deep; that they ran anywhere at all.

"You're the only thing in my life that makes any sense, right now," he says, softly, "and, I'm so fucking terrified of you going to same way as my dear old Mum. If she'd asked for help I'd have given it to her."

Suddenly, this tiny garden seems as vast as the fucking universe, to House, and just as encompassing.

"I can't stand the thought of anyone else leaving me."

It's so raw.

It's so…jarring.

A solemn vow.

House won't make promises he can't keep, can't fathom the fact that Chase can handle the loss of his father, the loss of his wife…but the idea of losing House, himself, is something that leads him to this.

(*)

Sickness and Health.

Vows of a marriage Chase doesn't recall.

How on earth could he have been married?

The irony is, Chase's monitors are indicating just that. Sickness. Ill health.

House looks the screen and informs Chase he has a fever, once he's finished 'plugging him in'.

It's only up a little, Chase argues, but a little is worse than nothing, to House, because it indicates a problem.

"I feel fine," he insists, but Chase learned to lie from House and his current mental age is years before he acquired such deceptive skills.

"Machines don't lie."

"And people do?"

House stares at him incredulous as he states "Everybody lies."

If the infection is in his head it could wipe him out. If it's in his leg...that doesn't bear mentioning. Chase refrains from admitting the shortness of breath, the dizziness, the tightness because his brain masks the seriousness and he knows it will delay his discharge.

He holds back from confessing that he started to feel worse when outside; that the coolness of the air made his lungs feel heavy and his head feel heavier, still.

"Do you feel any pain?"

"No."

"That's a lie."

"I can handle it."

As a boy he learned to hide, to pretend, to not be a burden...learned that being ill didn't garner him attention, instead resentment.

He doesn't know it was a trait that alienated his wife; ruined his marriage, because he didn't let her share his burdens until they were too much for her to carry.

He can't stop thinking about it. He can't let it go.

"My wife," he says, softly, then corrects himself. "Ex-wife. She'd be glad she left. I'm a mess."

"She'd love you right now," House says, as he draws blood, as he checks the pallor of Chase's skin. "She loved people who looked near death."

"Did she ever love me to begin with?" he asks, unconsciously asking that question that's burned him.

House can't answer that.

(*)

By noon he's burning - burning up, gasping for breath as his lungs struggle to work and his eyes are wide and scared as his fingers are grasping for purchase on something, anything.

He's done himself no favours.

Like his mother…he's suffered in silence.

"Ask for help," House yells at him, angrily, as he allows himself to be grasped, as he permits his body to be dragged and pleaded with. "Don't be such a hypocrite, Chase."

He knows that pretty soon he might not be conscious; that if this raging infection develops with such swiftness as it has been he'll be 'gone', soon.

He doesn't want an unfamiliar person making choices for him.

He doesn't want a woman he doesn't 'know' deciding on whether he lives or dies.

He asks for help.

He asks for House's help.

"You choose," he begs of him. "You're the only one. If anything happens to me…you choose."

It pains him, to put his trust in an addict, like his mother, but is it any worse than putting his trust in a stranger?


	7. Chapter 22

Have been trapped in South Africa for the past three weeks so it's been ages. Hope you can bring yourselves to read after all this time, if you are still around. This is just a little random chapter written on an Ipod on an 11 hour flight home. It did keep me company for a bit.

Please drop me a line to let me know how you all are, etc, as it's always nice to hear from people.

**Chapter 22**

The last time he invaded the personal space of one of his colleagues he was inspecting the contents of Cuddy's underwear drawer, piecing her together in imagines of satin and lace and completing a picture he'd not even glance at, these days. It'd be different, now, the haven of a patchwork family with dolls and bears and sensible underwear for the respectable working mother.

How people change.

How people abandon who they were once the trappings of adulthood finally take them in grasp at the age of Almost Forty.

This time, he's searching for something other than mould and possible sources of bodily corruption. This time, he's searching for pieces of a person that doesn't remember itself; a person that House never knew, never wanted to know, yet who now presents himself in the form of a puzzle that's so delicious and so tempting that House cannot leave it alone.

The steps up are neatly cleaned. The door, it's heavy wood, with an ornate lantern that sits unobtrusively beside like a jewel on the façade of a human body bringing light and beauty.

"He usually leaves the spare key taped underneath the post box but it's not here," Thirteen states as she frisks it, her manicured fingers scraping along the underneath of metal. Nails on a chalkboard. Since Chase doesn't know where he lives it would've been pointless asking him where he might've left the keys to his place so House does the only thing he can do.

He orders Thirteen to stand back like the gentleman that he is – and, then he kicks his good foot through the door, urging Bruce Willis to 'eat his heart out'. He can be extreme, like this. He can be thoughtless of consequence.

Stepping in through the breached doorway, Thirteen eyes him humourlessly, her arms folded tightly across her chest.

"You could've just asked his landlady. I'd expect she'd have a spare."

"And, where would be the fun in that? Live a little. You don't have long left."

Thirteen doesn't take offence to the slight on her life because to do so would be to deny House the one thing that defines him.

His honesty.

His brutal truths.

To do so would be to akin to denying him life. Or breath.

"He'll appreciate this in the long run. What's worse? A broken door or a broken mind. That's not even accounting the broken leg but, you know…legs heal. So do doors. Minds are a little more stubborn."

"He needs more than a few photographs, House. He needs time. And attention. He needs – "

" - I _know_ what he needs," House argues, and his voice is raised in tone and agitation. "But, giving him what he _wants_ isn't going to hurt him, is it?"

He wanted some parts of himself, because they're so hard to grasp.

He wanted some things of his own, just so he could figure out who he was; who he's been.

Who he doesn't remember…

Before they'd sedated him to assist with his breathing, he'd asked for only two things. For House to watch over him when he was unable to – and, for this.

Triggers.

Reminders.

In some cases, sad memories, like the picture in a frame of a small, blond boy gathered in the arms of his mother and father, his face devoid of a smile…

(*)

The place itself is neat. Unlived in. It's modern and attractive but bears no exhibitions of wealth - no gold cherubs adorning the ceilings; no expensive drapes at the windows…

Chase could've had it all if his father hadn't forgotten he had a son. There is torn off wallpaper, ready for something new, figurines wrapped in newspaper – a life placed in boxes.

"He's been replacing things left, right and centre since she left," Thirteen explains. "He wanted a fresh start. Too many memories, he said."

"That's funny," House replies. "Because, this place still reeks of Cameron. It's got her touch all over it."

The paintings on the walls. The colour of the carpet.

"Give him time. He only just lost her."

In theory, the Chase that lies unconscious in that hospital bed never even _had_ her.

Even the scent of the air has her mark upon it, as if he's been trying so hard to be free of her yet she still haunts him, just as Stacy haunted House for so long after she was gone.

Everything is so surprising. House expected grandeur, not modesty. Some might say this place personifies it's owner, in a sense, a man with looks and talent yet none of the unpleasant additions that go along with such attributes.

It's all so…empty.

"Does he even _live_ here?" House asks, as he surveys the untouched, soulless space where a life is supposedly lived and in which a marriage was broken.

"If you could call it living," Thirteen replies.

There's a coffee mug on the living room table.

As with Chase himself, these days, it's empty.

(*)

He sleeps on the couch. There's a pillow that's fallen on the floor and a bunched up woven blanket on the arm. It's well loved, yet falling to bits. If he asked, he'd find out that Chase's grandmother knitted it for him when he was seven years old; when his parents abandoned him for three months whilst they travelled Europe for medical conventions and 'fun'.

They hadn't wanted to be seen as a young couple with a child.

They hadn't wanted the burden of having to occupy their son.

How he'd loved those weeks with his grandmother, learning words from her native language with such a knack that she stated he was destined for intellect, just like his father was, and he'd cringed at the very thought of ever turning out like his dad.

Even at seven, Chase understood that he could never be like that man. That stranger.

The blanket has stood the test of time. It bears memories that Chase does not, holds within it a life that he barely remembers. Each and every time the world has turned the wrong way for him, that blanket has been his comfort and companion, not through childishness but sentimentality.

House touches it wanly.

He doesn't understand yet somehow understands, all at once.

The bedroom is untouched and House knows that sentiment, knows that the marital bed seems cold and unwelcoming when sleeping alone. It seemed to swallow him, after the event, seemed to mock and jeer. It never held the same love that it used to, never held love at all.

The more of Chase that House 'gets' from this place, the more sad and alone the kid seems…

There's a bottle on the floor next to the couch, within reach, and for a moment it breaks the reverie, holds House's interest, but it's sparkling water, nothing more sinister than that other than it's neat strawberry flavour. House doesn't know what he was hoping for. Something shameful, perhaps. Further hypocrisy in the form of vodka or gin – evidence of behaviour patterns that Chase would be seen to condemn.

"What kind of stuff am I looking for?" Thirteen calls out, but House doesn't respond.

Any kind of person could figure that out for themselves.

(*)

The note on the fridge in Cameron's handwriting reminding her husband she had yoga class with "Kimmy" and that he should fix himself dinner. The letters are swirls and at the bottom of the note there is a kiss and a hug. Cross and circle, as if Cameron is five years old and as if Chase is her little boy lover.

It's 'cutesy'. It's nauseating.

House doesn't know what bothers him more, the fact that it remains pride of place underneath that kangaroo fridge magnet - or the fact that she refers to him as "Chase" even in a loving note left as instruction to her husband, not her colleague. It's such lack of intimacy on her part, such sadness on his for having kept it.

It's clear, now, that she was a wound he kept scratching, a bruise that wouldn't heal, the act of a man still in love, still hoping.

The act of a man who hasn't been loved enough…

Thirteen holds a photograph in a frame, brown wood, polished to a shine. It shows a happy man and a happy woman glowing beneath the sunshine of their wedding vows.

Chase looks so handsome – and, Cameron looks so beautiful.

Their future looks so…bright, in this picture.

"What about this? He's been asking about her."

House wonders why one would wish to jog pain? Why give him back something that will lower him?

"She's not his wife any more," he says. "He's blessed, not remembering."

Thirteen thinks that House just wants Chase all to himself but she'd never say it, not with him looking so uncharacteristically sombre.

There's a book on the side of the coffee table. "How to Make Friends and Influence People." Chase had underlined parts of importance and it just seems so...telling.

"He's been working on it," Thirteen explains. "He thinks he needs to be more assertive. Socially? He's hopeless unless he's downed a few shots and loosened up."

House recalls how easily the alcohol went to his head at his bachelor party, how uncomfortable he'd been with his own attractiveness in that bar with Wilson - a social drinker...but rarely sociable.

It's just another symptom of an emotionally deprived childhood, shaped by his mother's illness, but it means something to him, clearly. This book, it means he's trying.

"This," House says, indicating the modest belongings he has gathered, "this is enough."

This is all he needs, the symbols of a modest life – of a young man who still holds on to parts of his past that were good to him and longs for a better future.

(*)

There's colour in the room, now, a little corner of a clinical hospital enriched with books. Items. A picture or two.

House arranges the items almost lovingly, all within Chase's view so that they can 'hit' him when he opens his eyes, overloading him, perhaps, but in a good way.

The patient sleeps peacefully under the woven fabric of his past, red, green, blue and soft – so soft.

He shifts a little, in his fevered dreams and as a precautionary machine saves him the trouble of pumping air into his lungs as his doctors try to heal them, House's voice pumps thoughts into his unconscious mind as he turns the pages of that damn book…as he reads aloud…

He sounds cynical as he speaks, as if the words mean nothing to him, but the fact that they mean something to Chase inspires him to continue.

To try to get through.

To try to break in gently, not like his foot kicked through that thick, wooden door.

"Six ways to make people like you. Number 3. Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language."

Chase knows at least that.

He at least knows his name…even if nothing else.


	8. Chapter 23

_Just a short part, here, written on the bus. As always, your words are my encouragement 3333_

**Part 23 **

**(*)  
**

Four days pass by but, for Chase, it might well be a lifetime spent sleeping.

The team have four patients, one of which dies, the remainder existing in some stage of recovery. For once, it WAS Lupus.

Taub cheats on his wife mentally fourteen times, once with an intern, thirteen times with her own sister. Wilson comforts one terminal patient in such a way that could be considered too much yet isn't. She appreciates the softness of his voice but he would never call it flirtation. He would never admit that his feet are starting to itch and his eyes are starting to wander.

Foreman gives two lectures to the interns on the workings of the human brain and Thirteen regrets their relationship too often to count.

Cameron sends thirty seven text messages, all of which go ignored, to a man she once loved about a man she once married. Cuddy tries her best to talk her down but can be of no comfort when she sobs regrettably down the telephone, knowing she has no power since Chase made the decision to sever the ties.

She accuses House, once again, via text - yet all he can remember is Chase's voice, upon explaining his wife's reservations towards his bachelor party; about the one last celebration of his life without her.

_Cameron will be very much against it. I need you to kidnap me._

He'd do it again just to save the kid; would kidnap him, hold him hostage, just so she couldn't do to him what she did before.

House doesn't fathom Thirteen's accusation that he's wanted Cameron out of Chase's life ever since she became a part of it because it's a stupid, worthless argument - because it was Chase he tried to kill, not Cameron, Romulus to House's Mars.

A sweet, strawberry death...

He doesnt want him dead, now.

The fact that he keeps on pushing the issue is making House realise just how much he wants Chase alive.

In the time the young man sleeps things change.

Other things stay the same.

The world calls Chase back, pulls him forth as if tired of holding his place. Words fall from the sky telling him to fly, to go free. To embrace wakefulness. It's to that familiar white place, with its lulling machinery and it's clinical purity, that he returns.

The colour of his consciousness is cobalt lined with black and it burns instead of chilling.

He stares long and hard at the man who was a friend before he was a stranger. He wants to tell him the world would fall if it were not for him; that he is the only thing standing between the boy and the abyss. He wants to tell him he's scared...and that him being there softens the blow. Makes him feel better.

His Nana used to let him crawl under the sheets with her when he felt like this and something makes him think of her. Her eyes were brown, not blue, and she was a substantially sized woman, whereas House is a slender man. Her opposite, in a lot of ways.

It's a good job there's a thick, plastic gag in his mouth, for those words alone might force House to admit something that has no place in him, that would make him feel as though he lost a part of himself when the ground opened up, too.

"Its about time you were up. Hasn't anyone ever told you it's rude to keep people waiting?"

It's 4am. House estimated the time well, based on the patient's weight and the gradual reduction of sedative medication. He volunteered to carry out the night shift just so he could cry off and be the first thing Chase saw.

The baby bird, fixating on the first thing it's newborn eyes see...

"You need to stop being complicated. It's not big and it's not clever and it doesn't earn you any extra brownie points. I drew the short straw, here."

Its a moment of Houseness before he lets that go. It's bravado.

Chase tries to free his own mouth but finds his hands are tied. His gag reflex is quelled by the residue drugs. He remains calm, though. He doesn't struggle.

House tells Chase that the infection is under control, that they'd give him back the breath they took away from him once they felt him able to cope.

"You're still vulnerable. Like a little lost puppy. You're still dreamy, to all of your nurses, and you're still a burden to me."

He still has a fever and he's still weak. They have to be certain, before they extubate again, and Chase will need to be weaned off the vent like a child is weaned from it's mother's milk. He looks...small. He looks barely the twenty years old he feels.

"Its laziness on your part, I feel. Expecting someone else to breathe for you...feed you...pee for you. Come on. I know you were born with a silver spoon but this is a little extreme."

There is no malice in his words but House looks tired. Dead tired. He reaches for his constant companion and comforter - and then he stops, remembering Chase's pleas. The pills remain untouched. Unloved.

He touches Chase, adjusts the central line going into his neck feeding him cocktails of meds designed to keep him on this earth and quietly presses the button which will draw attention to the fact that the patient is awake, if not alert.

With the words he uses he is trying to get a reaction, some reaction, to penetrate the sluggishness. To make sure Chase is coming back. Chase knows that House never went away.

When he blinks, slow as molasses, the gratitude and emotion escapes the corner of his eye in liquid form. He reaches out, equally slowly, as far as the soft ties will allow,and brushes his fingers against House's hand. He remembers how he always craved contact when he was feeling lost. That was before he shied from that basic human need, before he realised that the person he reached for would eventually, inevitably, pull away.

It's not House that leans forward, slowly and surely, to remove the evidence, to save Chase a humiliation he would have dived upon before, a grown man with tears in his eyes, grasping his grandmother's blanket unconsciously in his hand as if it could save him. It couldn't possibly be House that wipes that tear away without even saying a word.

House would never do that.

House's hands would never shake like this man's are.

House would never stay within eyeshot whilst Chase's former colleagues perform their ritualistic examinations upon him because that would be too close.

Too human.

"We just need a few minutes to assess the patient, Dr House. You can leave for a -"

"I'm not leaving," House replies. Short. Sharp.

"Just while we -"

His tone changes to "are you stupid?"

"I'm not leaving."

Sick of it, now. Harassed.

That's House. Stubborn. Defective, in a lot if ways, but, loyal. Loyal, to his cubs. To his ducklings and minions.


	9. Chapter 24

_Me again. I know i am probably annoying but this is keeping me sane on the long bus journeys._

_Thank you to all that review. You all know how good it feels to hear nice things. As for grammar - admittedly, I don't use BETAs by preference. If I went back to pick and pull and twist at what I wrote, I would end up losing all of what I liked about it in the first place. I learned this at Uni. Whilst I was always a bit more careful when I wrote for a reason I found that the more I poked and prodded the less I liked what I wrote. I suppose I will take the odd comma or hyphen as opposed to losing what I wanted by being too picky. I always write stream of consciousness. It just comes and I put it on a page. There are never any plans. I hope they are not too annoying, my rambling words that are occasionally wrong. I will try to be more careful but sometimes that makes me 'lose it'.  
_

_Had a bit of a Cuddy moment here , it seems! I have no idea why bit she was itching for time and House needed to do some actual work_.

**Chapter/Part 24**

**(*)**

It is a burden, this breathing thing. Illness doesn't always facilitate the workings of the human body, as only those who have been gravely ill can testify. Chase has come close to death with alarming regularity this past few days. It makes him ache with the pressure of being alive although he is encouraged to live when the machine supporting his status as living is removed.

Air is blown into his lungs by tiny prongs that itch and pinch but don't hurt, at least. For a while he relied upon ice chips to soothe his traumatised throat but the danger has passed, now, and the thing he had craved most was apple juice. He hadn't liked the stuff in years but it tasted like Heaven. If the blinds at the window had not embraced so much of the view he might have started looking for God when the sweetness of a long abandoned fruit hit his tortured trachea.

Life itself comes in short, ten-minute bursts, spaces between dosages and interludes in his forced sleep. He looks up, wondering which of the hanging bags of fluid and drugs is the one that makes it so. He knows he is being kept restful chemically but he chooses not to question it. He understands the necessity at this moment in time, for his body is a fractured temple that needs restoration.

He understands he pushed himself too hard, made himself sick, and that by letting him rest they are allowing him to heal.

He understands, finally, that the sensible man must trump the stubborn youth in future because the stubborn youth still acts as if invincible even though he knows it isn't so.

Sensible Chase holds the picture in his hands, a solitary figure graduating in a cap and gown, his hair longer than he could ever contemplate growing it. It's tousled, a blond mane, and he wonders what part of him thought that was acceptable. He hasn't surfed since he was seventeen and only then would the hair be a good idea.

The figure of his past and his future smiles as he faces the camera, young and proud, the picture of hope and anticipation.

"I can't believe that's me."

It's not that it doesn't _look_ like him.

The Australian inhales long and hard and he doesn't know if it's his addled lungs or the push of this absent memory that makes it so difficult to breathe. He only realises how weak he is when his voice is small and thready.

"I look so happy," he whispers, as he traces the image of his older-younger self. "I always convinced myself I didn't want this. I always thought I would graduate and then quit just to piss him off but all evidence points to the opposite."

"It's your life, Chase."

"I thought I'd be one of those people that worked long hours but hated my job."

"I don't think you ever called in sick a day in your life."

Cuddy tells it as she knows it. She doesn't know much but she knows that he loved what he did beyond words; that he saw the light and hope in each and every one of his patients, especially the children.

She's seen how he smiles at Rachel, how her daughter smiles in return because she's an intuitive kid and she knows who she's safe with.

He's a doctor who Cuddy knows she can trust to be sensitive and compassionate.

"A real job's worth", he says, as he tries his hardest to relate to that significant fact. "Who'd have thought?"

Chase hated the idea of medicine to begin with. He wanted only to get one over and prove his father wrong, his father who never though him good enough. Determined enough.

_"I will indulge you provided you follow through with this."_

When his son took hiatus to try to find answers from God, Rowan Chase felt proven correct.

_"It's science or religion, boy. You can't have it both ways. You take after you mother with all these flights of fancy and spiritual ideals."_

The fact that his mother drank herself to death, betraying the spiritual, had been lost on the man, as was the fact that human beings are multi-layered creatures who can believe in the afterlife as well as believing that sometimes, a person's time can be postponed.

Rowan told so many people not to hire his son, yet Chase will never know why. He will never know that the real reason behind his father's attempts at sabotage were because, in truth, he never wanted his boy to throw his life away the way that he did by marrying medicine instead of embracing the beauty of love.

A love he rarely received yet gave so wholeheartedly.

Cuddy's blue eyes are thoughtful, as encouraging as a mother's eyes.

"You love your job, Chase. You're good at it, too. I couldn't ask for any more from an employee."

"That doesn't sound like me. I don't show up for classes, I sometimes oversleep…"

Present tense, because sometimes he forgets that's not who he is, any more…

She tries to bring him back; tries to get him back to where she is, here and now, where he is an injured doctor and not a wayward twenty-year-old who sometimes doesn't remember to sleep.

"Believe me. I've had to warn you off forty-hour shifts before. Seriously, other than a few understandable glitches you're a credit."

The glitches have been big but there's no need to mention Kayla right now. He doesn't need that on his conscience whilst he's still so frail.

The patient smiles weakly. His eyes look blue in this light, so blue. So fresh.

"I guess there was nothing on TV those times. I guess it was before I was married, too. I had nothing to get home for."

Cuddy feels the stab in the pit of her stomach, the same one that creeps up every time she sees him, because his dedication to human life is what put him here in the first place.

She should have held him back.

"You just know where you're needed."

He proved he is willing to give everything he has when he kissed that little girl.

She touches the hand on his damaged arm and when he closes his own fingers over her touch she feels as if she's crossed a boundary,

He's just a child, now...

He is just an orphaned child with only House to fight his corner. House would have something to say about her predilection for mothering orphans in this case.

"I feel at home here," he says softly as he attempts a deep, rattling, painful breath that increases his heart rate and leaves him strained but brave. "I feel drawn to it, even if I don't remember it."

This was home to him in the absence of home.

"I feel drawn to him even if I don't remember him."

She understands that concept. Gregory House draws people in in the same way that currents and rip tides do.

"That's House. Magnetic, even when infuriating."

Cuddy remembers the young man, so fresh and raw, sat in front of her during the initial interview process. She remembers thinking that House would eat him alive in all his eager angelicism and eagernesd to do right. He held his own, though.

When he looks at her now she's never seen him this young. Not even then. She's never seen him so fragile, tied down by necessary tubes with his arm taped up and his leg in plaster, decorated crudely in black marker pen.

He sighs. Wheezes, like wind blowing through a partially opened window.

"Do you think I'll ever be able to come back? To my job, I mean. House said it might take awhile until my memory comes back but do you think I could?"

She remembers a kid who would die for his job, cheat for it.

Betray for it, even.

What does she see, now? What does House see, and what is he thinking giving him ideas like that?

What is this but false hope and cruelty?

His eyes are searching for something, now, asking a question that Cuddy doesn't know how to answer. Her heart sinks. She's been so busy hoping that his life would be spared that she hasn't had time to think about his job.

A job he is no longer capable of.

A job he no longer recalls how to perform.

She smiles that soft, Cuddy smile that he recognises but doesn't know how to read. She hopes he doesn't feel patronised when she tells him "get better, first. Then we can think about work."

It's by the grace of God, she thinks, that the meds start overpowering him. The questions will stop and she won't have to answer them. He apologises for his tiredness as his eyes begin to cloud over.

His last words before his consciousness leaves him are "tell House to go home and get some sleep. He's starting to look like a marsupial with all that fuzz on his face."

The words make her smile, make her laugh where she'd wanted to cry, before, because above all things Chase is a nice guy that keeps his head down and tries to make light.

As she looks at the soft, fair hair that is beginning to show on that broken head of his she thinks he could be speaking of himself when he mentions the animal of choice.

"Stay safe," she whispers, as he leaves the world temporarily, "and, I'm sorry."

She apologises to a man that is now a boy because she doesn't know how else to remove the irrational remorse.

She apologises because doesn't know what else to say.


	10. Chapter 25

…_in which Moody Chase puts in an appearance and performance…_

_As ever, comments are my drug. I don't know how many people are still reading but it does help. _

**Part 25**

(*)

There's something to be said about the nuclear fallout, the Hiroshima-inspired wasteland that is this boy's mind. How many times did he pray to God to remove the thoughts from his head; to erase the questionable deeds he has done so that he was no longer haunted by them?

He confessed to the mirror night after night, said his sorries as he tried to make peace with it all when all he wanted to do was turn back time and make the right choices.

He never made the right choices…

"_Sometimes I wish I could just start again. I wish I could forget everything that's happened to me and be who I could've been without all of this shit. I wish I could wind back the clock and just… just turn the other way." _

"You should be grateful," House says, as he reminds Chase of pleas he doesn't remember making.

"Grateful for this?"

"You're the quintessential example of the boy who wished too hard," House tells him, by way of explanation for his current predicament. "You religious people always get what you want. Where's the sense of equality? Do us atheists need to find ourselves a magic lamp to get our wishes granted?"

"We suffer for our faith," Chase replies, as House gathers his memorable belongings and places them in a box for 'the big move' downstairs. "I guess God has to give us something for all the sacrifices we make in His name."

"What, fasting at Lent? No sex for forty days? No Big Macs or filet mignon on a Friday and penance on a Sunday? Come on."

"We suffer for our faith," Chase repeats, as if those words are mystical and meaningful, and the only thing that House can imagine is that the Catholic church truly does brainwash the vulnerable masses in those hour-long sermons.

"I swear it's not incense they're burning in those shiny, metal bongs they carry up and down the aisles. I've always had my theories about that. If we were to do specific investigative blood work on a churchgoer moments after mass I guarantee we'd see something untoward in there."

Chase smiles.

"Spoken like a true non-believer."

Chase has suffered for his blank-slate state. He would argue that he did not ask for this and that he did not want it at all but the truth is that House knows him better than he knows himself, right now, and who would he be to question what he doesn't remember?

He asks, pray tell, what it was he was so eager to forget but House is cryptic as ever.

"You wanted to forget all of the ass-kissing you did to get to your current position."

_He earned it. _

"You wanted to forget all the bad lays you've had since your marriage broke down."

_In truth, none. _

He seems deadly serious when he tells the boy "You wanted to forget about cornering me in my office and telling me that we didn't have to be alone. That nobody would have to know."

_That can't be right, but Chase can't read House well, at times, can't see whether he is playing with him as a joke…or, whether he is telling the God's honest truth. _

"What's the matter?" the older man asks when he notices Chase's scepticism. "Is my cane too big an appendage for you?"

"That's not the appendage I was worried about," the 'boy' replies, and House has to check his temp just to make sure this truly is embarrassment and not secondary fever that's painting his face crimson-blush.

Chase knows that House is hiding something.

He knows that the other man is keeping things from him but he doesn't feel strong enough to ask. Instead, he just smiles unknowingly, shuffling to the side of the bed as best his bad leg will let him.

In all seriousness, House places a hand on his shoulder. The young man looks up, coy and gentle, happy to see that House's expression is genuine.

"What?" he asks, because he's unnerved by the sudden shift even if he is comforted by the physical contact.

House doesn't break his gaze, ice-blue and intent, and Chase swears if the look was any deeper it might bear into his brain and fix it.

"You scared me. Coughing your lungs up isn't a pretty sight."

"I'm sorry…"

"Having to watch them suction you made me want to throw up my bagels. Plus, I was pissed off that you'd dare conk out on me through lung-infection after I'd spent all that time singing you lullabies down in that death-trap. If you'd have died I'd have revived you and killed you myself."

It's not the first time Chase has frightened him with his fragile, human mortality.

The outrageous anger frightened him, until the brain swelling wore down and it dissipated. The refusal to accept help for his pain frightened him…until relief was forced upon him and there was no pain to speak of.

His mood swings frighten House – because, Chase was always so stable and, even now, he can change from bright to dark with no real trigger whatsoever but, is that not but a mirror of himself?

Should he not be frightened for himself, too, if this were so much of an issue?

Inevitably, most importantly, the thought of losing Chase frightened him…to the point that House realised, deep down, that he wasn't the heartless bastard he always prided himself on being, but he'll be God-damned if he's going to let anyone see that.

"I'm sorry," Chase says, again, as he nods his head in agreement with House's promise. "I'll try not to have any more setbacks."

"Try? _Try?_ You'd better do more than just try. I've wasted valuable poker nights to be here making sure you don't ride off into the sunset. You've cost me _thousands_ of dollars, no doubt so you'd better make it worth my while. "

The uncertainty has made him see red.

The worry has been…chaotic.

"Alright, alright"

Chase sighs as he looks around. Smiles, as he looks into the box at House's feet and all of those vivid images hit him once again.

_His grandmother, sat in a chair singing Czech folk songs to get him to settle down…_

_His old house in Melbourne with its wooden finish and its trees full of tropical birds, always with the promise of something more…_

"How can I refuse you? How can I say no after you've done all this for me?"

"All what?" House replies. "I picked up some junk from your apartment. No big deal. I made Thirteen carry it. And, I stole the chocolate from the drawer in your fridge. I checked out your diet, by the way. It sucks. It's no wonder you've been losing weight like Karen Carpenter. I'm going to start calling you Old Mother Hubbard."

He plays it down, as always. He makes his sarcastic jokes because they're easier than being honest.

He plays it down as meaningless because it saves him from acknowledging that every last 'thing' he picked up in that pitiful, lifeless abode had meaning to his minion, to the boy who sits before him, now, cherishing every last item.

Wouldn't that indicate his thoughtful side?

Wouldn't that tell of the part of him that gives a damn?

It's kind of telling, the way that Chase refuses to allow House to pack up that old, woollen blanket, instead holding it on his lap and resting his injured arm upon it. It's telling, the way that he slept night after night with a picture of an old, black dog within sight of him, governed over by his thirteen-year-old self in a blue striped t-shirt and a pair of baggy jeans.

He whispered her name as he went to sleep.

"_Callie…"_

It's telling, that he never opened his eyes with a smile until he realised he was not alone; how he would force himself to read a page of that damn self-help book every night, even when he could barely keep his eyes open from the meds he was receiving through that life-giving line in his body.

"Thank you," he says, out of nowhere, because all of this just makes him realise how grateful he is for life; how thankful he is to breathe air when, without this man, he'd be dust beneath the ground. "Thank you for saving my life."

His accent seems stronger, since his words became clearer. Since his capacity for language has 'fixed' itself he's pronounced his words with a twang he often tried to hide because he wanted so badly to fit in. He suppressed himself because he didn't think that people 'wanted' who he truly was.

Cameron complained she didn't know him…and, she wasn't wrong.

In his limited knowledge, he knows that House will refuse his gratitude. He knows that the response will be that House will push him away.

He also knows that the look that passes the other man's face is his brain processing those words, filing them away to be pored over when he is alone and out of scrutiny and when there is nobody there to judge his response.

"Don't thank me," he replies, predictable and expected. "I pity every day you spend in this shitty little world with a jigsaw for a mind and a bum leg that might never properly heal. I saved your life. You should hate me for that."

"But, I don't. I don't hate you. I wish I could be more like you."

"Then, you're more of a moron than I thought you were."

Wilson used to call Chase House's 'protégé' – used to comment that "the boy would do anything to be more like you."

Look at him, with his injured limb and his lonely, loveless existence.

All of this, all of this seems to be taking it just that little bit too far.

(*)

He leaves ICU for the second time in as long as he has been re-born yet, as he is pushed through these corridors, they are familiar to him not from 'before' but from since he awoke in this strange, future-world.

The walls are familiar.

The floor is familiar.

The smell, that's a constant.

When he arrives at his 'transitional space', as Foreman had attempted to call it, he smiles at Nurse Brenda and calls her by name. The delight in which his greeting is received is just bursting from her seams, out of character for a woman so tightly wound that her vertical stance seems to be maintained by a rod in her rectum.

She almost gushes.

"Oh, Robert, you remember?"

If he remembered her he wouldn't be smiling, would be surprised at her eager anticipation to see him up and well.

He remembers from before but not from 'before' and, as he smiles his hopeless smile, sweet and apologetic, her expression becomes so wrenchingly sympathetic that she seems close to tears. Her features are so hard, so pressed against her black, black hair, but Chase senses something beneath that hard façade in the same way he senses it from House.

"I'm sure it'll come back," she says, and the softness seems alien to her. "That's what the therapists are here for, to help it come back. You'll be back to hating me in no time."

"You're lovely and unforgettable, I'm sure," he replies, and there's no sarcasm in his tone as he says those words, not recalling what a pain in the ass that woman can be with her matriarchal dominance and the overt sternness that seems to emanate from her shapeless bosom.

She takes the box from his lap and she places it down on the chair beside his new bed. They gave him a private room to avoid his own embarrassment at being unable to answer the questions poked at him daily, nightly, from concerned 'friends' that he doesn't recognise at all.

It stresses him, to be unable to respond.

It makes the world swim around him with such currents that he can't stay afloat.

"I'm really sorry," he tells Brenda when he begins to empathise with everyone who he used to know yet now knows not at all. "It's nothing personal."

He gets the impression people think it is; that his forgetting them is some slight on their worth.

It's the insecurity of youth; the hang-ups of a sensitive young man that tried so hard to repress that side of him.

"I'm sure we'll get to know each other all over again while you're here. Anyway, they tell me you'll be starting physio shortly."

He smiles with such abandon it surprises her. Chase has a nice smile but he never smiled so freely; never expressed so fully in the presence of a fellow professional that he doesn't know on a deeper level.

"I can't wait."

"You do realise it'll hurt like Hell the first few days?"

He appreciates her blunt honesty. Similar to House, in a way.

He doesn't want to be treated as though he's crumbling rubble.

"It'll hurt, yeah, but once the cast comes off I'll be on my way out of here. I'm supposed to start on my arm in the next few days. They say once I'm up and about I'll be able to leave here pretty sharpish."

"Are you going back to your apartment? Since Dr Cameron left I assume you've been living alone."

A shot to his chest. A pang.

He could ask…

He could ask and he knows she'd tell him but, does he really want to know?

He swallows it up because he gets the feeling it wouldn't be wise to ask that question, right now, that it's a wound he might not be able to suffer, right now.

"What about a living facility? I'm sure we could get you a place in one of the more up-market rehab clinics."

"House wants me to stay with him until I get on my feet, good and proper. He reckons he's easy to live with and I don't know anyone better than I know him, at the minute, so I'm okay with that. I'll come in for physio and treatment with the neurologists every day so there's no need for a residential programme. It'll be good."

Her smile is forced but she doesn't pass judgment. The fact is, she'd rather be comatose in Intensive Care than living with that insidious infection of a man, good doctor or not.

To think this young man is so _raw_, at present, and to think he's looking forward to _that_.

"I just want to be out of this place. Out of this chair."

"Well, we can do something about that, at least."

It's like talking to an excitable teenager, she thinks, as he taps his fingers on the sides of the arms waiting to be helped out of it.

He doesn't look the same. He doesn't even _sound_ the same. She notices the difference in his tone but doesn't make comment upon it. It's what she'd describe as an 'Australianism' in that every end of his sentence makes it sound like a question as if he's unsure of himself, which he never was before - at least, not on any blatant level. Chase used to keep up a façade with her before. He never questioned anything, never wanted to appear devoid of knowledge even when he had his doubts.

As he's lifted his gown falls open.

His gown falls open – and, it all just goes downhill from there.

He hasn't that pride now, she notes, as the orderly helps him into bed. He struggles frantically with one arm trying to preserve his modesty, burning furiously when she transfers his catheter bag to the side of the bed.

He almost whimpers when her hands move to his chest to apply those sticky pads to the relevant points, flinches when she ensures that his ports and incisions are all safe and secure and that all of his necessities are taken care. He looks as if he's only just remembered they were all there, the 'bad' part of this 'upgrade' all of this caught up in his childish excitement.

"It's okay," she says, though her voice is firm. "I won't tell anyone. It's none of their business."

She won't tell anyone what she sees in this room, be it moments of weakness, sickness, bad dreams coming back to haunt the boy.

"What happens in this room stays in this room. I've seen many a man's behind when they've been too injured or ill to ensure that I didn't. You're not a doctor to me in this minute, Chase. You're just another patient."

He just feels embarrassed by it, embarrassed that he has to be in this weakened position at all; embarrassed that people he once worked alongside are now responsible for maintaining his fragile body; a body he no longer has any real control of.

She looks at him sympathetically and he's conscious and lucid and able to feel every scrutiny.

He _hates_ it.

He shifts uncomfortably as she secures the catheter tubing to his thigh, as she adjusts his clothing to make him more comfortable. His enthusiasm, it seems, has deflated - has abandoned him entirely, as he tells her "I'm good, now", as he tells her he can take care of everything else himself.

He attaches the monitoring clip to his finger to save her the trouble and to give himself at least one little action with which to help himself. He'd perform his own injections if permitted; if he had use of both hands. He would change his own IVs and catheter bags, if allowed…

He'd save her the trouble and himself the humiliation.

"I'm a nurse," she states, as she notes his mortification. "It's my job. I see this every day, Robert. You don't have to worry about any of it."

"Yeah," he replies, sinking down in the bed so far it's as if he wants it to swallow him whole.

She forgets he's 20 years old in the head; that he's a boy not yet truly turned man and that the idea of being seen as 'helpless' in front of a woman is truly humiliating to him.

"If there's anything you want," she begins, but he cuts her off so sharply it's almost painful.

He sounds angry, though whether it's with her or himself, she cannot understand.

"-I just want to be alone, thanks. Please. Just leave me alone."

Brenda isn't a woman to mollycoddle patients, especially not patients with medical backgrounds, but she'll cut him some slack for the time being.

She'll be sure to tell House, though – will tittle-tattle in the Doctor's ear about the way 'his' boy went from up to down so fast she's surprised he didn't suffer altitude sickness in reverse.

It could just be the machismo of a young, young man. Or, it could be a symptom of the 'new' Chase – a by-product of an injured brain turning stability into bipolar.

She closes the door to his room purposely loudly just to get a reaction from the young man.

As she looks through the window of his room she notes that he doesn't even flinch.


	11. Chapter 26

**Part 26**

**(*)**

The revelation isn't quite a revelation but an extension of a previous issue.

It's only when Wilson enquires as to House's availability to attend a 'monster' monster truck event that he realises just how far behind he comes in his best friend's list of priorities.

"It'll be a classic."

The smile doesn't meet House's eyes. It's sarcastic. It's benevolent but sardonic.

"Sorry, no can do."

It used to be a non-questionable event. Now, House's schedule is so 'full' that he doesn't even have time for the things he loves. Wilson would stop short at saying 'for the people he loves' because he's not sure House loves anyone in the world but himself.

"House, when did you ever pass up free food and entertainment? I'm offering you blue steak and a giant serving of…monster trucks. Free of charge. I'm giving. You don't even need to take."

"Well, where's the fun in that? It takes all the fun out of the acquisition if you just _give_."

"House –"

Spoken with such incredulousness, such disbelief that there might even be a need for persuasion.

House doesn't flinch.

"Take your floozie, Wilson. I'm sure she'd appreciate crawling into your welcoming arms and pretending to be afraid of the big, bad, rumbling machines."

"She doesn't like monster trucks."

"No, but she likes manipulating you with her womanliness."

The voice is high-pitched. It's mocking. It's feminine.

He places his hands on either side of his cheek for emphasis.

"_Oh, James, it's so loud here. Oh, James, they're so dirty and noisy and vicious. Oh, James, let me fleece you with my vulnerability. Is this place in your lap free? _She'll have you handing over the cash for a chick flick before you can even cry overtime because she went slumming it on the Boy's Night Out."

"Boy's Night Out, House. Since when have you been able to say no to that?"

Monster Trucks have long since been their 'thing'. Their lives are filled with critical illness and the frailty of human life, of the tenuous hold that one must preserve in order to remain tied to this mortal coil and to save it from unravelling. Seeing those tiny, tiny people in those crushing, grinding, apocalyptic machines cheating death for pure entertainment has always been their guilty pleasure.

Monster trucks, it seems, are not enough to tear House away from his latest 'game'.

"It's like jelly bean jigsaw all over again," Wilson sighs, as he reminisces of the days when House turned hermit and holed himself up in his apartment every night for seven weeks trying to defeat those shiny, coloured candies patterned over 5,000 pieces. "I don't believe this."

"Oh, so because I have places to be and people to see, all of a sudden I'm neglecting you? Need I remind you, you kicked me out of your place to live on the streets just because you were getting re-laid by a woman who got tired of you the first time round."

"Places to be? People to see? House, you never leave this place. Your 'people to see' - or, should I say person to see - divides his time equally between sleeping and…what else does he do?"

"He lets me win at poker."

"Probably because he doesn't remember how to play and you're bleeding him dry. That's cruel. Have you no morals?"

"Do you really need to ask that questions? This is poker. There are no morals in poker. I can take advantage of the brain damaged kid."

" - Which reminds me. You said you'd let me back in on your poker club. When do you sit?"

Ah, the poker club. The exclusive gentleman's get-together.

House looks at him, deadpan, and says "on the same night as your salsa classes" before casually walking away.

He can already picture Wilson's face, knows it without turning around. He can picture the shellshock, the blankness, the utter disbelief in those rich, brown eyes. He can imagine the pseudo-rejection in his gait, the way he will slowly turn and walk away, eyes focused at the ground as he tries to figure out just what's invading House's body; just what's got inside of him that is changing him in such a manner that he cannot keep up.

"Unbelievable," he hears, one word whispered and bouncing from the walls of the corridor as Wilson follows pattern, as he lives up to House's kicked canine image of him.

Unbelievable that he'd sacrifice something he enjoys for a patient.

Unbelievable, indeed, that he'd do it for reasons other than selfish ones.

He almost feels like he's passed up an opportunity for nothing when he opens the door to that dim, quiet room and sees what can only be likened to a teenage sulk-fest.

Chase refuses to look at him, instead choosing the reflection of light in the window. He fixates upon it as if it could empower him, somehow.

"What do _you_ want?" he asks, picking at his sheets with an almost violent insistence.

His voice is low. His mood is lower. House had already been warned that his 'crackle' had given way to 'snap' and 'pop' – that he'd turned inward over something as petty as a flashed butt cheek.

He never took Chase as the modest type…

"You want to strip me naked and take my picture? Make me feel even more humiliated? Maybe you could take out an ad in the newspaper. "Come look at helpless Chase. He's sure to make you feel good about yourself. I don't even know these people but they know everything about me. They've seen everything I have."

He sighs.

"They've watched the making and breaking of my marriage and that's not fair."

"Oh, boo hoo."

House won't pander to it. Not when he's giving up so much to be here. Not when he's giving up free food, all-you-can-drink and enough masculine roar to keep his testosterone high and mighty for the rest of the month.

The bitterness continues. House doesn't recognise it, doesn't recognise Chase.

He wonders how it might feel to not recognise yourself…

"Hey, maybe you could use your Good Doctor's bonus to take out a full middle page spread."

Such a callow youth, this boy is.

House might as well take this opportunity to bring him up to speed with communications. Newspaper ads? In print?

"Surely it'd be easier to put it online? I've got my own website. . I could just post the link on the hospital intranet and it wouldn't cost me a penny. Don't worry. I'll photoshop you so you look better. Bigger. I could make you a God or a mouse, my friend."

He watches closely, carefully. He searches for sign of that face cracking; for the mood alleviating and something more positive returning.

He watches as Chase tries to fight it; tries to fight the slight upturn of his lips. The minute softening of those features as House makes light once again…

Under his breath, he calls him a '_dag_'…

"Don't give me that attitude, Robert," House warns. "I'll send you to bed without supper and ground you until you turn 21. Again. I mean it. You won't get over the door when we get home. I'll hide your crutches. I'll tie you to the bed-frame. You'll be begging with me to put you out of your misery."

Again, he watches. Waits.

The laugh can't really be labelled a laugh.

More a snigger, really…

"Alright, dad…"


	12. Chapter 27

_Hola all,_

_Just another quick part. I'm taking them to House's place in a bit, so just working towards that. _

_Sorry about the POV thing, by the way. It's just the way I write, really. I like one event to be seen through many eyes. I try to be as clear as I can. And, no, the only 'medical background' I have is personal experience! _

_3_

(*)

**Part 27**

The physio is more gruelling than Chase could ever have imagined. He sees red flashes in his head, deep and clear as if it's filling with blood, as if it's splitting from the inside.

He tries to push through the mist. House says it's pain that makes a person chaotic, be it mental or physical, and there seems to be elements of that very same thing in Chase, right now.

"_Pain drives honesty into a person because there's no longer room for niceties. Do you think I was always so shrill?"_

Still confined to a wheelchair with his badly broken leg out of commission, Chase fights for the use of his arm, a surgeon's arm, the 'scribe' of an 'artist' who uses his hands for his profession and is virtually useless without it.

He remembers using his hands for writing notes in study books recently, scrawls in the margins for later contemplation. He remembers using them to inject pig-skin because it's as close to human as one can get.

The fact that he can't imagine cutting into a person's body in order to save them doesn't mean he doesn't value the ability to do so.

Taub's voice is loud. Clearer than his mind can take. It splits through him as he stretches his good leg, mindful of the twitches in his bad one as he does so.

"You're doing great."

He's unsure as to why that bald-headed Jewish stranger of a man is making the effort to act as his cheering squad but he's here, Taub, here to egg him on. Here for encouragement because he's nowhere else to be.

It's opportunistic, to Chase. He doesn't value the man using him as 'entertainment' because his pain is making his mind congeal and all thoughts of a masculine sense of humour are long gone.

"Don't you have somewhere to be?" he grunts, through gritted teeth, and he doesn't understand it's the fraternal humour of a colleague when Taub replies "Seeing you as less than perfect? I wouldn't miss this for the world."

"When was I ever perfect?"

"You weren't. It's just nice that you're able to show that, now. I used to look at you and wonder if you could ever just admit that you were defeated."

"Nice. Really nice."

"House says to treat you the way I normally would. It's the best way, for people with lost memories. I'm only doing as I'm told."

_I'm only doing what's best for you. _

"This is just…how we are. Push and pull. Give and take."

_People wallow in the suffering of others. Even friends, Chase, didn't you know?_

"You like seeing me hurting?"

"No. I like seeing you trying."

Taub doesn't mean his words cruelly. A few weeks ago Chase would've rolled his eyes and contemplated the value of his own hair as opposed to Taub's lack of as a retort but not now. Not now.

The patient knows of Taub's reputation, though. House couldn't hold his own water.

He gives back, because isn't that what people do? Isn't that what Taub just said?

"Aren't there any interns you can hit on? I hear Amanda the receptionist thinks you're a spunk. She says you're quite the catch when your wife's tucked away elsewhere."

"As opposed to you, of course?"

Chase doesn't know what that means. The context of the words are left in question. Chase, it seems, decides against rising to the bait. He continues to smile, though it's clear his mind's gone blank as he loses focus, momentarily.

Taub can't accept the fact that 'that' Chase isn't here any more and that 'this' Chase perhaps needs a little more tact; a little more thought, because the pride of a young man is second to none.

Chase had a sense of humour as a young man. His self-esteem was so low, however, that any slight often felt like a hammering blow. He tries to smirk sarcastically but it comes out as more of a grimace.

"Keep up the good work," Taub says, finally, and his smile is as enigmatic as ever.

"Yeah," Chase replies, his voice edged with something bitter, an ingredient he didn't add by choice and that feels wrong on his tongue. "Yeah, you too."

(*)

"Just try to lift it. Try not to tense all of your muscles at once. Try to focus all of your energy into spreading the weight equally."

They make it sound so simple. They make it sound like child's play.

They make it sound like he should be able to do this without a hitch but to Chase, this weight is that of the universe and it's resting on his injured shoulder.

"Just a little more."

"I'm _trying_."

He's failing. God, he's failing and it makes him want to throw something. His body is weak through lack of use and his injured limb seems weighty; ten tonnes, aching and deadweight.

After twenty-six minutes he gives in to his own sense of superiority and begs for something to kill the pain. Morphine. Demerol. _Vicodin_.

"Anything."

He pleads for salvation but he can't have his dose for another three hours without suffering lethargy, nausea, painful retching that comes from deep within his stomach. They can't overdose him. Not without certain risks. House's tolerance for medication is second-to-none. Chase, for years, hasn't so much as touched an aspirin, his body not accustomed to chemicals invading his vessels and cells.

"Please – "

"I'm sorry. We can't give you any more."

Irrationally, he feels that the physio is lying. That he's not sorry at all. That he's as amused as Taub was at watching him suffer before duty called him elsewhere.

Unreasonably, Chase feels that this is a purposeful bout of torture designed to get back to him for some slight he doesn't remember.

"We're almost done. Then you can rest."

"I can't – " he says, but he doesn't mean he can't rest.

He just means he can't.

Every last movement is agony for him and he tries to force his way through but the limb won't function the way it should and the muscles are so tense that they're practically solid. He tries his hardest to lift his arm but it battles against him to such an extent that he can't even curls his hand around the ball they demand that he squeeze as a way of relieving himself.

"Come on," they urge, as he manipulates that injured limb. "Just three more and then we're done."

I know it's difficult, they say.

I know it's hard, and the words grate on him yet he doesn't know why.

He shouldn't be angry…but he is.

"How the Hell do you know?" he growls, and it's pain more than anything that angers him, so. He said it to Anne, once, when she tried her best to comfort him on the anniversary of his mother's death. I'm so sorry, she said. I know how this must feel for you.

He'd choked out a response. He'd succumbed to grief. He'd pushed her away as he'd said "When you find your mother dead in her own vomit, then you can tell me you know how this must feel."

He hadn't meant to make her cry. He certainly hadn't meant to make her leave but that night he slept alone with only that ragged, woollen blanket to comfort him and the ghost of his not-long-since-dead mother staring at him on the long, cold night.

When he's angry, he pushes emotionally. Or, he shuts off. He demands a response – or, he is rendered silent.

When he's in pain, he pushes harder. Or, he succumbs. He hurts himself more – or, he curls up and begs for it to stop.

When cornered – he just sinks in his seat, head down, tries not to get caught.

The physio tries his hardest. They always do.

"I understand what you're going through. It might not seem that way but I see this every day. I see how hard people work every day."

"Oh, so that makes you an expert?"

_So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel…_

He remembers a movie that defines "I know how you feel." It seems like he watched it only last week. He's said those words to the family of a patient once, maybe twice, before he realised how arbitrary those words were. How could he possibly know? How could he possibly know how it feels to see a loved on so dependant upon another that he cannot even breathe; how it feels to watch your own child suffer whilst you can only watch?

How can these people know how hard it is for him, in the same way?

Chase has never been a quitter, but something inside of him snaps when he realises that it's all uphill from here; that he'll have to fight through all of this to get to a place he doesn't even remember reaching.

It's embarrassment, more than anything, that makes him give in.

Shame at his weakness.

Humiliation at his begging, pleading desperation for relief.

"I'm done," he says, as his blood-shot eyes cloud over and his whole body begins to tremble as if going into shock. "I'm done. I'm done with this."

"You need to go back?"

"I can't do this."

"Okay. Alright."

His eyes, they're no longer bitter but very bright, fever-bright, and filled with something akin to…terror.

He's terrified of his own fragility, scared shitless of what he is right now, and of what he needs.

This time, he doesn't shrug off the hand on his shoulder and when he hears that voice say "it'll get easier" he doesn't argue. He just nods again. No words. As if language has betrayed him.

He tries to smile apologetically, sorry for his outbursts and behaviour, but he can't find the energy.

"We'll call it a day for now. We'll see how we go tomorrow."

The thought of another day of this just makes the patient feel ten thousand times worse.

(*)

His face is coated in perspiration when he returns to his room. He looks red. Dead, almost. He holds his bad arm so close to his chest it's as if he fears it's going to escape him. As if holding it tight will relieve the pain, somehow.

There's House, sat in the chair waiting for him, spinning that yo-yo as if it's nothing. As if all this is just…casual.

"You look good," he says, as he pops a bubble of gum against his lips. "I've been waiting for you."

"Nobody asked you to."

The aggression is still there and House will feed from that. The helplessness is still eating away at him, but its wounded pride more than anything. He knows how pitiful he is right now, knows just how thin and small and _insignificant_ he looks…

For some reason, for some strange, deep, grinding reason, he no longer wants House to see him like this.

This ragged.

This worn out.

There is no hair to stick to his forehead but his scar throbs, livid and bright, a constant reminder of the damage that rages inside.

He sighs, deep and hard, and House sees the building depression as Chase lays his head back on the pillow, as he covers his face with his arm. He sees him try to catch his breath. He sees him try to shut out the world.

"I'm tired," he says, though there's no expression in his voice. "You might as well just go."

"I could just leave," House says. "But, then where would you be? A wounded little soldier with no idea where your place is in the world. And, where would I be? A gamer with no resolution."

He's trying to turn this into a convenience thing. He's trying to make Chase think that they're using each other because from personal experience it's better to 'take' than to 'need'.

"You say it so often, Chase, but you still scream for me every time you wake up."

"Please. I just want to be alone. I'm too tired for all of this."

The break in his voice, it renders House silent. Thoughtful. He sees his own slashes of red and he wonders, "Should I care?"

"I can't do this any more, House. I can't be here any more."

It steals his words because there are no words to say, but in this second, in this room, he sees something that cuts him deep, a symptom in Chase that he fears more than he fears the memory loss, more than he fears the mood swings.

More than he fears the future…

He sees defeat. Raw, aching defeat. He sees a boy that's so frustrated and so worn that he's simply given up.

"You mght as well just go," House says, repeating Chase's words back at him, though there's no juvenile backdrop to his voice.

You might as well go, he says.

You might as well go, for all the good staying here is going to do you.

"You're stable, your white cell count's normal, you're off most of the meds. Technically, you're only here because you need hands-on care, which I can provide. Hanging an IV isn't beyond me, regardless of what Cuddy will tell you, and I can give a shot without even bruising the skin."

He ponders that thought.

"Although I prefer to leave a mark, obviously."

He watches as the arm falls down, as the eyes focus, as the tiredness takes second place to the curiosity.

"This place isn't good for a person's mental wellbeing. There's too much going on. As a healing environment it admittedly sucks."

"What are you saying?"

He still sounds broken and exhausted but there's meaning in his tone, now. There's direction.

"Your leg's a problem, granted, and you're still under strict medical supervision but I'm a_ doctor_."

"You are."

House stands up, gets closer, and this time Chase doesn't growl, doesn't express distaste and doesn't force him away.

This time, he lets him stay. Lets him speak.

"Look. Your apathetic, Chase, as well as being pathetic. I heard all about your physio session. I've heard all about your refusal to eat, your constant insistence that you need to sleep. Christ, Thirteen's ass and Cuddy's breasts don't even gather a response from you."

"I hate this…"

"You think I don't know what it's like to be stuck in a place like this indefinitely because you're too injured to go home and too fucked up to be alone?"

The pain in his own leg throbs, as if in agreement, and the way he unconsciously rubs it is testimony to that fact.

He, himself, sighs.

"Look, Chase. I'm not much more tolerant than Brenda, out there, and I sure as Hell am not going to hold your hand when I take you to the bathroom but my place is a damn site more interesting than this place and to be perfectly honest I'm starting to miss it."

"So, you'll take me home? Is that what you're saying? You'll get me out of this place?"

The place he used to hang around even when he didn't need to be here.

The place that used to be 'home' even more than 'home' is.

"I thought you were a clever guy. I thought you knew how to read between the lines. I never realised you were so stupid."

Chase ignores the slight. It doesn't even sting.

"So, you'll do it, then? You'll make them let me go? I'd have signed myself out days ago if I could but they wouldn't let me because of my brain injury and my poor decision making skills but you already know that, don't you? You already know that you can do it, don't you?"

So excited, he sounds. So hopeful, and House sees hope where hope was lost and that was his intention all along.

The transformation is beautiful, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Something bright and charming from something grubby, dark, close to the floor.

"You'll have them release me, House. Please."

Sooner than recommended but, God, not soon enough.

Chase is like a kid at Christmas and it's amazing what the promise of bigger, better things does for a person that was just about to hit rock-bottom.

"House…"

House doesn't answer. He simply pops a bubble and leaves Chase hanging.

Dangling on a string, just like that yo-yo.


	13. Chapter 28

_This is just a small part, a little snippet of 'homecoming' which shall be expanded upon._

_I hope is okay. _

_Many thanks to those that take the time to review. As always, is much appreciated. _

**PART 28**

Wilson drives them 'home'.

Chase takes up the entire back seat, his steadfast refusal of an ambulance to transfer him testimony to his character; his need to be of little inconvenience. He stares out of the window as if it's the first time he's seen the city and his eyes are those of a tourist, peeled and absorbing.

He pays no heed to the banter of grown men that seem like adolescent siblings to those that listen. Instead, he butters himself with culture that's said to be 'local' to him, smearing it over his mind as if to flavour it.

He sees a bar named 'Linsky's' and it triggers a memory, one which Remy placed in his head with such luscious validity that he felt it couldn't possibly be false and, as he looks at the curved writing of that sign above the door he can almost feel the tequila burning his throat as the ultra-violet lights colour his skin a fantastic shade of purple. There's a man outside handing out fliers dressed in a brown leather jacket and a hat that fits tight to his head.

He looks cold, but Chase is warm. He dances on his feet to keep the chill away, and Chase envies his ability to do that.

"I recognise this place," he says, as he predicts a bakery, a newspaper stall and a great, grass verge hedged with Conifer trees and black iron lampposts.

"This is the red light district," House informs him. "God only knows why this is the place that sticks in your head."

Wilson scolds House about putting false ideas into a vulnerable mind and Chase, in that moment, resents the implication that he can't handle it but it does make him wonder just what's the truth and whatever House has told him is a mocking fabrication.

"There's a place up ahead," Wilson tells him, eyeing him in the rear-view mirror. "It's a few blocks down, over on the right. You and Cameron used to eat there all the time. She liked seafood and it's the best place in town."

"I never liked seafood," Chase replies, because it's the truth. His expression is…disturbed. Disturbed by the idea that anyone would talk him into frequenting a place where salmon is served with its head still intact. "Anything that belongs in the sea doesn't' belong on my plate."

He was seventeen before he tried anything with a shell and he only tried lobster because his father wanted to impress a Clinical Director with his cultured, educated children.

It worked, too.

"Of all the places we could go to," he says, under his breath, as he contemplates just how much he must've changed.

House doesn't look at him when he says, "Yeah, you really were a pushover. I'm surprised you didn't give yourself cancer just to keep her sweet."

(*)

It's not House that helps him out of the car. How could it be? He can barely help himself.

For a moment, Chase wonders if it's such a good idea to burden House with his own disobedient body but, with some sheer effort, he can place all of his weight on one crutch and his bad arm isn't even affected. It's something, at least.

House turns around and looks at him, leaning against Wilson, and the expression is one of impatience.

"Well, come on. This box is heavy."

House carries with him Chase's basic medical necessities; the long-term antibiotics for his lung condition (to be administered via injection or IV infusion), his anti-seizure medication (which he will require for 12 months, the precise amount of time his driving license will be suspended for, following his last seizure). Painkillers (which House will not steal), sedatives (because, at times, his brain fails to shut down of its own accord, exerting itself as it heals…)

Chase is disturbed by what it is he requires because treatment all blurs into nothing when you're stuck in a hospital bed with only your next shot as a way to estimate the passage of time.

Wilson helps him inside with the patience of a Saint as Chase is hindered by a useless, plastered leg and an arm that he cannot allow anybody to touch.

"Thank God you're not heavy," Wilson tells him, because Chase's weight is still low and his eating habits have still not returned to normal. "I'm sure House's famed cooking will help with that."

Wilson remembers night after night of kitchen noise, of numerous mornings spent marvelling over the thickness of House's pancakes, moulded in withdrawal yet tasting, in some way, of metaphorical cold-turkey.

Chase smiles and says, "I hope he can master a Vegemite sandwich."

Chase can't, can't seem to master anything. His brain tells him he's full when he's not, a mental block that inspired his doctors to threaten a further NG tube if he didn't up his calorie intake.

It wasn't that he didn't want to eat. It wasn't that he was doing it on purpose, though the psychologist they sent to see him with alarming regularity might have labelled it an 'act of defiance'.

Sometimes, when he tries to read the contents on the labels he's given (as was always customary to the health-conscious young man), the words don't make sense to him, nor does the language they're written in, and he gets so upset that he loses what little appetite he has.

He'll try not to be so difficult, now, knows that House won't stand for it.

"Dump him somewhere near the TV so I can keep him quiet with Disney flicks and Nick Jnr. I need to take a shower."

As House disappears into the bedroom, Chase is deposited on a leather couch, his heavy, laden leg propped up on the coffee table.

Thoughtfully, Wilson offers him a cushion to soothe his arm, comments that he won't get such consideration from House.

"Are you sure you want to be here with him?" he asks. "He's no Florence Nightingale."

"I'm sure he's no Mengele, either," Chase says, in response, as he smiles as politely as his discomfort allows.

The couch, at least, is comfortable.

_He looks around as he had in the car. Wilson makes the comment that he's in House's favourite position and that he'll likely be evicted soon but all Chase can think of is the fact that the pictures on the wall seem familiar to him; that the piano in the corner strikes chords with him that are deeper than musical._

_He can hear it. Feel it._

_He sees a flash in his mind, an older 'him' with his sandy hair falling into jovial eyes, a blond woman with finger-twisted curls and a glass of red wine in her hand._

_He sees a flash of House, sat in a rock-print T-shirt, playing blues music on that very piano, whiskey on the rocks sat patiently on top waiting for attention as he attends to keys of black and white._

_They're in a bar with brick walls and an Irish feel._

_House entertains the masses as Chase reaches out for a soft, pale hand whose fingers curl around his almost possessively..._

Chase blinks. Hard.

He tries to make clear the image in his head but as he reaches out for it, it falls away out of his grasp.

"Is something wrong?" Wilson asks, because Chase seemed vacant for more than just a moment and the rapid blink of his eyes makes him wonder if he lost consciousness.

"N-nothing," Chase replies, as his eyes dart, as his hand runs nervously down his leg as if to calm himself. "I'm fine."

He sighs, disarms himself.

"The move. It's just knackered me out. I know it was only a few steps but it felt like a marathon."

"It's understandable. I had mono when I was eighteen and I spent two weeks in bed. I could barely even lift a finger for weeks."

Chase smiles, thanks Wilson for his time and attention.

Then he moves back to his own.

They call them triggers, random objects that unlock the fortress-like doors within the mind of an amnesiac.

Chase's mind is a prison of information, of people, of thoughts, of memories, of feelings.

House, it seems, holds the key.


	14. Chapter 29

_So, House and Chase start off their life of domestic bliss…or, something. _

**Part 29**

The only thing he can think of is "another me lives another life."

Another life. Another Chase. Another Chase that wears sweaters and shirts rather than coloured t-shirts with sports logos and hooded jackets to keep his body warm.

Another Chase that watches Hitchcock Old Classics on TV with his wife after 12 hour shifts rather than The X Files with his girlfriend.

What does he even enjoy doing, now? What does he even like?

He genuinely doesn't know, and it's not that he's indecisive. It's just that those nuances of personality have been taken from him and he's finding it hard to rebuild.

Wilson left him with three pills and a glass of water before he had to return to work. He couldn't remember what the first two were but he knows the third will make him drowsy after thirty minutes or so and that he'll want to sleep it off.

He'll hope above all things that the dreams it gives him are pleasant ones…

He's alone on a couch with a TV remote in his hand and a hundred channels from which to choose. He looks at it all as if its alien to him; as if the concept is lost. Before, he might've known the sports channel that shows the cricket is on 553 or that Classic Movies is 325.

Now, he knows nothing.

One might ask him "What's your favourite TV show?" and he wouldn't be able to tell them.

He doesn't know that Mulder left the show and Scully tried to continue regardless; that the guy with the ears from Terminator 2 was the writer's big hope to replace the man around whom the show was built.

He doesn't know what "Heroes" is, nor can he name a character from Desperate Housewives because his 'real' life and his 'perceived' life do not correlate.

Nothing computes.

"Damn it."

It's aimless, this pressing of buttons, but that's not the whole of it. That's not the entirety of this moment of wilful self-destruct.

After this many days and weeks of recovery, he _still _can't see things in true and proper focus and it only hits him now how frightening that could be.

He squints hard. It hurts, but he does it anyway, and nothing becomes clearer. Nothing in his head. Nothing in his eyes. It bothers him when he realises the picture isn't pristine and he wonders if he damaged his eyes along with everything else. They told him the optic nerve was intact but what if he had damage to his occipital lobe that the scans didn't pick up?

What if it wasn't a temporary thing, as they insisted, but a fixture in his new life?

_He had a lazy eye as a little boy and had to wear a patch to try to correct it. He was seven. He thought he might be blind, like Stevie Wonder, but his mother assured him that wasn't the case. He had to wear a patch every day to try to correct the problem, not a visual problem but a problem with the muscle. It was a common condition amongst children, a condition which required regular visitations with a specialist in order to fix the problem. _

_So many other children would be sat waiting looking just like Robert did...  
_

"_Look at me," one little boy in the pediatric reception area cried as he spun in his corrective patch. "Look at me, I'm a pirate."_

_Chase looked to his own parents for something similar but he never got such a thing. Instead, his father taught him the medical term for his condition ('strabismus') and made him learn word for word its precise cause because it was 'important he understood'._

_He didn't want to understand. He just wanted to play._

_He didn't want knowledge – he wanted a hook and a ship and a parrot on his shoulder. _

_He was told not to behave in an infantile manner when he began to call himself 'Captain Jesse' and it made him sad and confused because that other little boy had been allowed to act like a child whereas he was expected to be a grown up._

There had been nothing wrong with his vision, yet here he is now struggling to read the numbers and letters on the screen as he'd struggled to read the words and ingredients on those food labels. It wasn't just the words he couldn't understand; it was their shape. It was their form, the same with the words in that book that House brought him; the book he forced himself to read. The book he apparently held so dear yet remembers not at all.

He'd imagined the pictures and words would clear up in time but what if they don't?

Chase presses some more buttons and hopes for a change but each image is the same. Blurred around the edges, just like he is.

"Porn's higher up."

"I'm not looking for porn, I'm – "

"-looking for cartoons? Oh, Chase. 'Daddy' has Toy Story on DVD if you'd like me to put it on for you. I stole it out of Cuddy's office when she was hiding Rachel's gifts from Santa. I stole the chocolate box, too, because I had PMS and I needed a fix."

House stands in the doorway dressed only in a towel. He leans casually, cane-less, shameless because this is his place and if he chooses to walk around it devoid of clothing then that's entirely up to him. Chase is a student, mentally, and isn't this what students do? They leave pizza boxes in the middle of the floor and they prance around in their underwear.

He remembers those times well. He remembers all that and more, relishes this chance to relive it in his older years with a man who outgrew it long ago yet has returned to that post-adolescent state so opportunistically.

Chase looks at him with a sulky look of defeat on his face and the way he dumps the remote onto the table beside his injured leg is a childish protest.

"Stupid TV."

"What's the matter?" House asks. "I pay for all the channels. A few hundred options and you can't be satisfied with any one of them?"

"It's not that."

"Then, what is it?"

He's finding it hard to look at House. How proud that makes the older man. How proud and how pleased he feels to make the young man squirm.

"I can't talk to you when you're wearing that," he says. "It's…distracting."

It's almost like a dare. It's almost like a challenge. It's almost like Chase telling House what to do, how to dress and how to behave in his own home and he's not going to stand for that.

The rules are his. They're his to be broken.

The chaos of House's living space is nothing short of unspeakable, in a lot of ways, and Wilson would tell any man, woman or child that he's a demon to live with.

"Distracting. Distracting, you say?"

Chase understands that House is pissing on his territory when he drops the towel entirely; when he parades into the kitchen entirely naked simply because this is his place, his space and because he can.

"Cuddy's tops are distracting. Thirteen's PVC catsuit is _extremely_ distracting. In certain lights, Taub's bald patch is distracting and the interns in the clinic tell me that your eyes are more distracting than your pert little ass."

Chase closes those distracting eyes and shakes his head but he can't help but smile.

Can't help but smile that the very feature of which House speaks is the feature that is causing him bother.

"Me, naturalising myself in my own abode, is not distracting. In fact, I dare say it's something you'll have to get used to. I have no boundaries."

He holds his hands out, as if in confession. Submission.

"I have no shame."

All of the tension drains away from Chase in this moment, cast aside by the absurdity of this whole scenario; of a man who doesn't know himself living with a man who doesn't curb himself and whose example might, indeed, be as bad as any example could be.

House looks out from behind the open fridge door and fakes anger as Chase simply stares in amazement at him.

"What am I," House asks, and the mocking sense of degradation is as convincing as it is dramatic. "I'm not some piece of meat you can pore over again and again, Mr Chase. I'm a human being, you know?"

"I wasn't even looking…"

He pulls on a pair of boxer shorts from the drier and some sweat pants that look a size or two too small.

As he closes the door he's regained his 'sanity'; looks at Chase as if a lesson should have been learned.

He doesn't even smile.

"This is how I live," he says. "This is how I am. This is what I have. You can either deal with it or I can take you back to the hospital and sign you back in myself. I didn't promise you a rose garden and a nice wicker chair set. I have crappy cable. I have a fridge full of food that will have your nutritionalist collapsing in horror. I make stupid comments and I walk around naked when the mood takes me. Sometimes, if I can't sleep, I play piano until 5 in the morning."

"House, it's not that it's not good enough…"

He gets the feeling House thought him ungrateful. Spoiled.

He gets the feeling the older man thought him behaving like the Youth of Today, never satisfied, far too difficult to please.

"It's not the TV. It's not your precious cable package that's stupid."

"Then, what? Because, your Aussie soap operas play overnight when most intelligent people are asleep."

"House."

He's quiet.

He looks serious. And, sad.

"Nobody's tested my eyes yet. Not properly. I know I used to have perfect vision. I was the only person in my family to not need glasses and I was so, so proud of that."

Just one way of being 'better'. More perfect.

"Now, when I look at your TV screen, when I read books, notes, newspapers, whatever - I can barely make out anything at all."

His hand falls limply into his lap as he says those words.

"It's all just…out of sync. Just like me."

"So, we get you some glasses or contacts and we take it from there. You'll see your porn in glorious high definition and it'll all be good from there."

House tries to imagine how Chase will look in glasses, figures it fits that the man whose personality has changed entirely might as well change his 'look' too.

He wonders if the interns will be fawning over his 'beautiful eyes' when they're magnified behind designer lenses; whether they'll love him for the geek that he has become or pine for the 'perfect' man he was.

House thinks "Fuck them."

Fuck them, if they'll desire him any less because his eyes don't work so good as they did; because perhaps he's a little scarred and a little changed.

Fuck every one of them who look upon him with pity, now, instead of respect, because doesn't House know all about that?

Doesn't he still get those looks, even now?


	15. Chapter 30

_I've heard all these rumours about her coming back. I guess it was just in the back of my mind…_

**Part 30**

She arrives unexpectedly.

A hurricane shows more warning. A tropical storm at least has the decency of announcing its arrival on a weather board where scientists can ponder its effects and provide damage-control in advance.

The devastation she could cause isn't predictable. She could cause more damage than a typhoon, drowning her ex-partner in emotions he doesn't know how to handle at his new, young age. She could tear little bits off him like a tornado might, lifting him off the ground and then dropping him from a great height.

There is no eye to the storm that is Chase, nor the natural disaster that is Allison Cameron.

"I'm not here for him," she insists, as she walks into Cuddy's office with her arms folded over her designer suit jacket and her hair tumbling in newly-brown waves down onto her shoulder-pads.

Cuddy looks up from her paperwork and asks no questions.

"I never said you were."

She understands the woman's defensiveness but she doesn't want to be a part of it. She 'gets' her need for explanation but Cuddy is not the woman she should be explaining herself to.

Cuddy isn't quite sure who deserves this but it certainly isn't her.

"You all fought so hard to keep me away from him that I felt I should let you know he's not what I'm here for."

"Allison, you're always welcome here," Cuddy tries, diffusing the woman's inner conflict, or at least attempting to, but Cameron doesn't want to hear niceties. She's not in the mood for politeness.

"Always welcome. Right. That's why he fought tooth and nail to have himself named proxy so he had the right to keep me away."

"That had nothing to do with me."

"I never said that it did, but please don't sit there and tell me I'm welcome here any time when the only thing that's missing is my poster up on the walls warning people to call security if they so much as see me."

House can be - obsessive, that Cuddy knows. House can be possessive. House gets his little games and his little toys and nobody else is allowed to play with them but that's not why he wanted Cameron kept away.

There is so much dust swept under the rug, so many pains that linger when the two C names are pushed together.

It's all just a gaping, bleeding wound, and Cuddy knows that Chase isn't ready to face that, with all else that's going on for him.

"He's fragile," Cuddy explains. "He's not the same man you knew."

"Does House really thing I'd do anything to hurt him? My God."

It's hard to know that the man she once loved thinks of her as that kind of monster, true or not. It's difficult to know that she is thought of as an allergen; something that might cause an adverse reaction.

She sighs.

"Look, I'm just here to pick up some things. I'm giving lectures once a week. I made notes. They're filed in the archives. I just needed to pick them up."

She looks like a little girl, in this moment. "I thought – "

She swallows. Her neck is swan-like and her eyes are full of pain. They dart. She bites her lip and tries to control her dignity; to preserve herself in front of a woman she once looked up to.

"I thought I might just see him. House can't pull the critical card if he's stable."

She looks embarrassed, now, like a child caught with her hand in the biscuit tin, trying her best to explain herself.

"I thought maybe he'd want to see me, too."

She sees a flash, notes a look in Cuddy's eyes that she doesn't want to see and in that moment she knows. Even before anything is spoken aloud, she knows.

It's so hard for her to hear the words that come from Cuddy's lips, so difficult to process those five little arrows to her chest.

"Allison, he doesn't remember you."

(*)

It's all just…different.

Chase is in physio and House is in conference with his team about a case of suspected Propofol Infusion Syndrome. The patient was brought over from Princeton General. She's dying of kidney failure and her heart is failing her, neither of which are natural responses to an isolated head injury.

"It's rare but it fits," Thirteen insists and she's not wrong.

If she dies, it will be hard for the family to hear that it wasn't the injury that killed her but the drugs used to try to save her.

They pore over her ICU notes as, in that dusty archive room, Cameron pores over her weeks-long absence.

She looks to the corner of the room where the wooden shelves meet and the filing cabinets create a space in the darkness. She remembers grabbing Chase's hand and dragging the reluctant man inside, locking the door behind them.

She trapped him. House told her that, over and over. She cornered him and he mistook fear for love. She captivated him, and he mistook control and possession for genuine emotion.

She imagines his eyes darting towards the door, worried beyond belief that they were going to get caught, that they were going to get fired.

She remembers placing a finger over his lips and asking "What's more important? That, or me?"

It was a stupid question. Looking back, perhaps House was right. She did trap him. She did hold him.

She did trick him into loving her…

"_Do you think he'd ever have had the guts to switch those notes if you hadn't put the idea into his head? Do you think he'd have had the nerve to kill a man if you hadn't given him the green light? Don't you dare tell me it was me that ruined him when it was you all along."_

If nothing else, she wants to tell Chase she's sorry. Sorry for leaving him. Sorry for perhaps not loving him in the right way.

"_I did love you…"_

She feels wetness in her eyes but brushes it away quicker than it can fall because this isn't an emotional visit. This trip is necessity. She's here on business, not pleasure. She needs those notes.

The cynical might argue the case of Fed Ex delivery but she's here, and that's all that's important.

When she locates her box, her file, it's done. She's done.

As she turns off the light she gives the space one last glance, hoping to see the ghosts of her past and his burning their candles at both ends – two beautiful people, neither ruined by murder, by conflict, by divorce, by life-changing injury...

She looks long and hard, sees nothing.

(*)

She sees them by chance, sat facing each other in the cafeteria at lunch. Cameron wouldn't recognise her husband in a dark blue baseball cap and stylish new glasses, his face seeming years younger despite everything that he's suffered.

Her head, it tells her "Keep walking," but her heart – her heart breaks a little when he notices her staring.

She notices he's eating lemon yoghurt and it itches, because she knows his favourite is raspberry and he would never, ever have lunch here without it.

She wants to interfere, to get him what he likes, but she catches House's attention and it's all she can do to stand still without running.

"Oh, Christ," he says, and it draws Chase's attention, too.

He looks up at her, at this dark haired woman with a look on her face that he doesn't understand, and he smiles politely.

Politely, and without recognition.

It's all she needs, all she needs to prove to her that she cannot be part of his life any more, that his recovery is progressing without her helping hand.

She smiles, files in hand, stoic look painted on a face like bone china.

"House", she says, by way of acknowledgment and in return he calls her Allison because Chase knows only the name Cameron and he doesn't want to tip him off.

Her hair is dark. He'll be expecting blonde. To House, she looks different. Is different. Deep down, he knows he's been cruel to her – but, don't they say one has to be cruel in order to be kind?

Nothing in Chase's clueless behaviour indicates any identification whatsoever with this woman.

"Is it right?" she asks, and it's all she wants to know. Her voice doesn't tremble. She keeps emotion out of it. "Is it helping?"

She will accept his judgment. She will honour his medical opinion.

"It's better to not have at all than to have and to lose, but that's just my call."

She nods.

"Then, I'll accept your decision."

She smiles at Chase, smiles at the young man that doesn't know her.

She touches his arm and tells him she hopes he feels better soon.

He thanks her, but his instinct is to pull his arm away. He doesn't like anyone touching it. He doesn't like anyone touching him, not so soon after physio when his body aches and his skin feels burned and raw.

When she leaves he finds himself glad she's gone.

He looks at House, who looks to have released a bundle of tension so large it had been crushing him.

Chase smiles, totally misinterpreting the exchange.

He asks if that was one of House's one night stands; if she was one of the old candy stripers he had his wicked way with.

"What was all that about? It's best not to have than to have and to lose?"

"It's not wrong."

"Well, I don't think she's let go, House. The way she was looking at you, seriously, you could have cut the sexual tension with a knife."

It's so sad to think he's speaking of the woman he married.

Sadder still that he didn't see the 'sexual tension' lingering even when he took his vows; when she took hers, all the while wishing it was House stood beside her, not his younger protégé.

"Eat up, four eyes" House warns, because the exchange has proven great distraction to Chase. "Eat up or I'll put you in four point restraints and force feed you myself. I can do it. I'm qualified."

Chase dips his spoon into that small, plastic pot and stirs it half-heartedly.

"You're such a charmer," he says, under his breath. "I can see why she wanted you so badly when you say things like that."

He slowly lifts the spoon to his mouth, not quite savouring the taste.

And again, it's a shame he couldn't see that when it mattered.


	16. Chapter 31

_This is a bit of a moody chapter, I must say. _

_Many thanks to those that are taking the time to review. It certainly does make my day. Since I have been home sick with a chest infection and having had virtually no sleep whatsoever, this might be reflective of my somewhat dismal mood. _

_Chase's little Ups and Downs are really reaching a peak, here. Sunshine one minute, thunder the next. One has to wonder whether House's 'protection' is making matters worse… _

**Part 31**

He finds it difficult to concentrate during his neuropsych appointment because there's always this feeling of being kept in the dark.

The room itself is dark. Dark, but for the green-yellow glow of the observation room lighting. He lies in a loose fitted hospital gown squinting against the harshness of the machinery. They've taken his glasses and his vision is more blurred than before, his eyes having grown accustomed to his new visual aids.

He feels blind. Confined.

He hates this more than he hates the physio…

Chase lies perfectly still for his CT scan, staring at the groove of white and silver above his head before letting his eyes slip shut and trying to block it out. He tries to sleep through the grating, piercing sound above him, a sound reminiscent of hammers on the old wooden roof of the garden-house he and his uncle had built for his mother after her husband left. He tried to take himself back to that time but finds it difficult to visualise. One image bleeds into the next, a mish-mash of history that has no start and no finish.

_Come on Chase_, he thinks. _Give yourself something memorable to dream of…_

He loved that place and he can't even properly see it in his mind's eye. Perhaps that eye needs glasses, too. Perhaps that eye is afflicted as his 'original' ones.

It was a Swiss style 'haven' at the bottom of their garden, a haven his mother doted on for months until she could no longer find the will to drag herself out there. In the end it was Chase that enjoyed the freedom of that place, Chase who would lie on blankets on that warm, wooden floor counting the stars from a tiny, glass window.

It was such a beautiful, peaceful place and more often than not he found himself sleeping in there to save from lying awake and listening to the sound of his mother's slow death; to quieten down her words of disappointment that often rang so loud that even the neighbours could hear.

"He planted a seed in me," she would say, with bitterness in her voice, "and look at what it grew into. The image of him, and not me."

She planted roses in the compost outside of that window and pruned them until they grew big and strong, nurtured by her own hand until her own hand reached for the bottle instead of the watering can.

Chase kept them alive whilst she couldn't.

Chase kept that place beautiful whilst she didn't care to.

It seems cruel to open his eyes and find himself still lying on the moving slab of the scanning machine precisely where he had been left.

(*)

They tell him that his scans look 'good' but he doesn't know what that means, doesn't know how an injured brain could possibly look anything but injured.

When he asks about his potential for recovery they're still evasive, just like they always are.

"How did the swelling in the temporal lobe look? Is it easing off? I know there's damage there but Foreman thinks there's a chance things will become clearer when it starts healing properly."

"It looked good, Chase."

"The last scan showed some minor bleeding. Is that still the case? Is that why I still can't remember?"

"You just have to be patient. There was improvement. We're scanning you repeatedly to map your progress."

"Then why aren't I making any?"

Their answers anger him. They give him little information whatsoever and he feels he deserves more than that. His hand forms a fist against the arm of the chair and if he's not careful he'll break it.

He tastes blood in his mouth having bit the insides out of sheer frustration.

He knows he didn't always do that…

The doctor places a hand on his shoulder. It doesn't placate him. It just makes him feel patronised.

"Just come back to the office and we can talk. I can assess you properly in a quieter place. You've been showing great improvement during our meetings, Chase. Don't sell yourself short."

It's hard for Chase to accept improvement when he can't feel it. They tell him he has to have faith but he seems to remember that being something he always had problems with.

Chase needs tangible proof. He might be able to move his arm, now, and there might be talk of him moving onto a removable cast for his leg but that progress is just physical.

Mentally, he still feels like a little boy, misplaced, out of time.

He's still a callow youth that's expected to be a man before his years…

(*)

It's cold in the office.

He's sat in a chair near to the door. It's leather, atypical of this kind of room. Gone is the clinical whiteness of the other exam rooms, replaced by the almost studious, Principle-like grandeur of dark wooden furniture and down-turned lamps.

He smiles as he's handed a glass of water, which he places on the table beside him and waits for the inevitable line of questioning.

He's so sick of it all, so tired of the repetitive motions he's going through, minimal progress with maximum effort.

"How are you feeling?"

It's always the same opening. It never changes. He's encouraged not to give a generic answer such as "fine" because that cannot be worked with. They're here to try to 'fix' his broken mind as much as they're here to try to ensure he doesn't over-tax it.

They cannot work with falsities and the rule is "straight talk only."

How is he feeling?

"I'm feeling angry, Doctor."

The doctor smiles serenely. He's always so serene. There's never any emotion and Chase often mistakes it for smugness.

"Angry? Why are you angry?"

_Isn't it obvious?_

"Because nobody listens to what I have to say, nobody lets me do anything for myself and I'm continually fobbed off when I ask for a proper medical update."

"Who do you feel is fobbing you off, Chase? And, why do you think that is?"

Who? Why? What for? When? He's tired of his every question being turned on him; his every comment being made into a tool from which to draw from him.

"You. The physios. The neurologists. Everyone. The only one who treats me like my thoughts matter is House and he can't tell me what I need to know. You ask why? I don't know why. Maybe you think I'm too stupid to understand."

"And you feel powerless. Is that right? You feel that being kept out of the loop is detrimental to your recovery."

Chase ponders this. The doctor notes his unconscious body language, the way he touches the back of his neck, his fingers at a loss because there was once hair there to be curled around his finger. He notes how the young man will repeatedly touch his clothing, a nervous twitch, perhaps, or simply a way of focusing.

There are a lot of things of note when it comes to Robert Chase, none more visible than in these moments where he is stripped raw and bare, exposing his own vulnerability…

He sighs.

"I feel powerless, yes. I feel trapped. I feel like I'm constantly being watched and that people are so quick to look at me but they won't share what they're seeing."

His eyes look wide. Blue and pleading.

He reaches out physically, as if for something to hold onto.

"I get the feeling people are hiding things from me, not just medical issues but personal issues, too. Sometimes, I see people looking at me as if they're expecting some kind of reaction but I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be reacting to."

"Can you give an example?"

"Today. I felt like everyone was staring at me. It was like they were waiting for something but I didn't know what. I was just sat there with House. I wasn't doing anything. I was just attempting to finish lunch."

"Why do you think they were staring at you? Have you been feeling paranoid, Chase?"

"It's _not_ paranoia."

"Having the feeling of being watched for no reason is paranoia, Chase. Have you been experiencing any other irrational thoughts? Is there anything we should be concerned about?"

It's common to develop symptoms of psychosis after traumatic brain injury but that's not what this is.

If this doctor were to speak to House he might confirm Chase's thoughts; might explain why they were staring and just what it is they were expecting to see.

If this doctor were to speak to House he might be told that the great reunion between Chase and Ex-Chase was the main attraction at lunch and that, yes, people were interested to see just what would happen and just what sparks might fly.

Chase doesn't know any of that, though.

He doesn't know much…

"I'm not crazy. I'm not paranoid. I'm just telling you what I feel. Isn't that what you're always telling me to do?"

"You're telling me of symptoms, yes, and I have to be on the look out for anything which might point to psychosis. You know that."

"For God's sake, I'm not psychotic."

"Nobody said you were."

He hates this doctor-speak. He hates the table turning.

He hates every last thing being a symptom and a sign and every last thought being torn at as if it meant something.

They wonder why he can't be honest at times but to Chase, honesty might well be a pathway into a padded cell with his arms tied around him and his legs lashed to the bed-frame.

"I feel like I'm the big show but I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be doing. I feel like I'm the main feature but I'm stumped on how I'm supposed to be acting."

He's distraught.

His dam has burst and everything inside him is just spilling out.

"Tell me. Tell me, doctor. Is this it for me, now? Am I always going to be this confused? Is it always going to be that people know me better than I know myself?"

There are tears in his eyes.

He's staring at the doctor, imploring him to satisfy these questions. He's looking for answers. He's pleading for help. For knowledge. For the promise of something better…

"Please. Just tell me."

It's a critical point. There's no turning back. The doctor has to satisfy his patient's needs or else risk losing him completely.

The truth, however, might just send him spinning so hard and so fast he won't be able to stop…

"The swelling's minimal," the doctor concludes. "The bleeding's stopped. All that's left now is scar tissue."

It's a revelation, but not a good one.

It's an answer – but, not the one Chase has been looking for.

"So, what does that mean, exactly?"

"There's no pressure, Chase. There's no haemorrhaging. Nothing in your scans indicates any kind of subsiding damage that could be causing your memory loss."

It's his turn to sigh, now. He always believed in giving the patients hope if nothing could be diagnosed for certain. His medical opinion, however, is that the afflictions to Chase's memory, to his personality, to his thought processes, to his mental abilities are not going to subside.

The injury is healed. All that's left are the scars in its wake.

"You wanted honesty, Chase. How does it make you feel?"

Feel. Feel. How does it make him feel?

What are you feelings, Chase? What does it_ feel_ like?

He doesn't answer the question. Instead, he looks at the clock on the wall. He looks grateful, yet angered. He looks satisfied – yet, not satisfied at all.

He looks…absent.

"I've given you an answer. I've given you truth. I've been brutally honest and I didn't think you were ready for that. I'd like to know if you're going to be okay with this. I need to know if you're stable enough to leave."

Chase doesn't look at the doctor. Instead, he just stares at the ground. He grinds his teeth for no apparent reason, his jaw moving to the left and to the right.

The doctor notes the behaviour.

It concerns him.

"Do I need to intervene, Chase? Do I need to recommend you be held until you've been able to process this?"

And, the patient turns the tables

The patient offers nothing in response, just as they've offered him nothing until now.

He looks up. He stares the doctor in the eye as if challenging him.

His feelings are uncontrollable, directed at the one who brought them forth.

"Chase – " the doctor tries, one last time.

"Time's up," the patient chokes out because he has nothing else to say.


	17. Chapter 32

_Somebody pondered a better 'role' for Foreman and indicated that he did, indeed, attempt to care about Chase. _

_Seemed fitting, therefore, that he should 'care' in this chapter!_

_Hope is okay._

**Part 32**

This patchwork version of Chase was 'born' from an underground chasm, surrounded by rocks and stone, into the arms of a stand-in 'father' that never wanted a child but got one.

Got a boy. Got a responsibility. Got himself a bouncing baby that isn't so much bouncing but bewildered.

Chase was born again on a dark evening, and the 'womb' was an empty space.

At this moment in time, he feels like he died down there…

He's not happy with his proposed overnight 'incarceration', nor is he happy with his doctor's dismal diagnosis. For a man whose head is a locked door enough, this Is too much.

"You could keep me here for months. It's not going to make me want to open up my own head any less."

As a choice of words, it's not the greatest. He lacks the quickfire ability to dream up consequences. He fails to think before he speaks, is at times profuse, not tempered. The words spill from his mouth like prisoners that should be locked up for life.

He gets the impression he'll be locked up for life if he doesn't take a stand.

He calls for Foreman because Foreman gives him hope, cuts him slack. It might well be false hope but it's better than none at all. It doesn't occur to Chase that he is asking to be lied to, requesting, on some level, the very thing that has ailed him. Desperate, Chase looks for something enticing in Foreman's second opinion. His needs are very selfish, at present. Fickle, in that he will seek out anyone that can help him.

He's teenaged, in a way.

Foreman sees the teenager in Chase when that petulant lip turns inward and those usually calm eyes turn from sky at morning to storm overhead. It's hard to see them as windows to a soul because the soul is so tentatively fixed. Disjointed. He fidgets like a teenager. His eye contact is that of an autistic child. Forced, when there. Non-existent at other times.

"Just be cool, Chase. There's no need to lose your temper."

It wouldn't be his fault if he did. Again, unmoderated. It can no longer be put down to brain swelling, though it has improved over time.

This could just be how he is, now. Highly emotional. Feelings, without reservations.

He bites his nail. He looks at Foreman out of the corner of his eye.

'"I get a little angry and you all act like I'm some kind of murderer."

There's an irony in that statement that Foreman has to bypass. To sidestep. He might not agree with House's non-disclosure in some areas but that one is a no go.

This Chase isn't guilty of anything.

"Am I not allowed to feel anything without you holding it against me?"

"Nobody holds anything against you, Chase, you know that."

"Then why do you all want me locked away or worse?"

Now he just looks confused.

Bewildered.

"They just want you kept safe."

Chase appreciates Foreman; that much is clear. After years spent trying to outsmart him, he has something for him, now, which equals trust and it's something Foreman thought he would never see. So often, Chase looked upon him with an air of suspicion, as if forever expecting betrayal. Even a kind word was met with a sideways glance, as if there was some deeper meaning, some ulterior motive.

It was as if he no longer knew how to accept a favour or thought without ties.

He calls upon Foreman, now, because he feels a sense of familiarity when he's with him and that means more to him than anything, right now.

He looks...sad.

"You all think I'm some kind of lunatic."

Foreman attempts to play Devil's Advocate without shattering the eggshells he's successfully walked so far.

He tries to be the voice of reason without damaging the brittle truce he's drawn up.

"You've been given something huge to deal with, here," Foreman says. "Its perfectly natural for it to fuck with your head. You've been...erratic. They just want to observe you -"

"- I don't _need_ observation. I don't need anyone watching me while I deal. I'd do much better with a tinnie and a few shots of vodka."

It's how Foreman might cope, a blow-out, a fresh outlook in the morning. Alcohol wipes the spirit. It presses the reset button.

"I just need to drown everything out."

"Is that how you normally deal with this kind of thing? That's not the man I know."

That's the cold truth though, isn't it? That's the cruel, hard fact. Chase's words are harder, still.

"I'm not the man you know any more, am I? That's the point. I barely even know you."

It's not wrong. It's not unfair, either. Chase is firm and totally lucid. There will be no arguments. He shakes his head. Again, there us that bitter lemon smile.

"I'm not staying here. I'm not. I'm not letting them hold me because they think I'm going to top myself, or something like that."

"Look, you can't go out and get hammered. You're on too many meds for that."

"Then, take me somewhere I can clear my head and forget about all of this _turd_."

It's such a juvenile word, such a non-Chase sentiment.

It proves that his maturity is growing at the rate his hair grows. It's still short. Lacking.

He's still lacking.

To keep some semblance of peace, Foreman takes him out. Away. He signs him out AMA and on his head be it. House threatens him with rules and curfews but Foreman will deal with this little break as he sees fit.

He tells House he's not the kid's father and warns him he should realise the same.

It was almost priceless to see the look on the older man's face as he told him "I'm as capable a guardian as you are!"

They sit.

They try to relax.

Foreman talks to draw Chase out, tries to get him to talk about himself. He soundtracks their meeting with modern music, hoping Chase might unconsciously remember the words.

He exposes himself mentally, allowing Chase inside if it's where he wants to be. It's as if he is saying "this is me, this is you. You can trust me."

Their only rule is that they don't speak of 'it' unless Chase brings it up.

It works well for them both.

()

To Chase, Foreman represents an older man, war-wounded and as scarred as he is – a man who changed his life and who made sense of the kaleidoscope that is his own universe. He pictures gang colours hanging from black clothing. Baggy jeans. Leather jackets and guns in waistbands, easily concealed.

Chase has the wrong impression of Foreman, but then he has the wrong impression of himself. As impressions go, his are more thin pencil drawing than full-scale oil on canvass.

He sits in the booth feeling too young to be there. This casual endeavour hangs on him like his father's suit jacket, stolen and modelled at age seven before he hung it up on the wardrobe door.

"We came here a few times," Foreman explains. "It wasn't a regular thing. We've had some…issues, of late, that we both shared."

"What kind of issues?"

Foreman takes the alcohol in deep. He lets the taste swill around his mouth. He coats himself with this sweet, nectar drug before he attempts to lie his way out of this.

It seems so sinful, to lie about murder to one who committed it, but the sad truth is that Chase's life has been a ministry of lies, of late. As a neurologist, Foreman knows the necessity for such lies, but it doesn't make them easier to swallow or to spit.

"The usual issues," he says, reluctantly meeting Chase's eyes. "Work. Women."

_Murder. Accessory to murder…_

"Typical guy stuff, then?"

_Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice…doctored paperwork…lethal injections…_

"Yeah. I guess you could say that."

It's odd that it brought them closer, somehow, the breakdown of Chase's marriage and the volatile trigger for the very same event. It's odd that the ultimate crime could bring together a privileged blond white boy and a reformed, ex-con black guy in a way that benefited them both.

Chase and Foreman were never friends – but, after Dibala they did become more than just colleagues. Their lives were irreversibly entwined by the deed that Chase committed; that Foreman helped to erase like a match to an evidential document.

"You like that this place is in walking distance to your apartment. You don't drive unless you have to. You like that you can be invisible, in here."

The words seem strange when put together and its vividly uncomfortable to state the obvious in this way. He's telling the Chase things he should know but doesn't; things about himself that should be obvious but aren't. Chase leans forward as if he's interested to hear of their escapades though in truth it was nothing more than two men from within the same decade blowing off steam when they both felt kicked by life.

Chase never imagined he'd be hanging out in bars. It was never his thing.

Not unless he was trying to forget.

"What's my drink of choice, now?" Chase asks, and he's not surprised to hear it's still mineral water, girlish to the point of ridiculous with a dashing of lime.

He always imagined he'd follow in mother's footsteps; that he'd crash and burn, one day, just like she did.

"I've see you drunk on two or three occasions," Foreman admits. "All of them were understandable."

House told him he was tee-total but he finds himself questioning everything he tells him, of late. He's happy to know that he kept his principles at least; that he is a drinker on special occasions and nothing more.

"You know when to stop."

"Yeah, I learned that."

"You don't let yourself go often but when you do its like a door opening, you know? Its like letting out the stuffy air and allowing the breeze in."

"I'm stuffy?"

"You're uptight. You're so terrified of letting yourself fall short that you don't let yourself go even half enough."

Chase remembers college parties and Uni events, how he'd drive all of his friends home when they were too drunk to walk straight.

How many times did he hold a girl's hair back whilst she vomited in the toilet, all the while calculating just how much she could lose before severe dehydration set in…

He smiles. It's…shy. Embarrassed.

He taps his finger on the table and says "I prefer to keep my wits about me. Sometimes, when everything's a little bit crazy, I like to down a few shots and get myself smiling."

"Yeah. But, you'd never let it get the better of you. You're strong like that. I respect that."

Foreman remembers the camaraderie felt when they'd all stood up on the stage and perforated the heart of the Midnight Train to Georgia, letting its engine bleed out all over the stage. He remembers the look of youth on Chase's face, a look that was so often hidden beneath layers of stress and insecurity that when it finally allowed itself to be seen it truly was like a light being shone in his eyes.

How Chase had laughed.

How he'd laughed at his Bachelor Party before it all went wrong, and how naïve he'd been when he'd been so totally unable to lie to his future wife about how it came to be that he was strapped to a gurney with a mask taped to his face and an overnight stay ahead of him…

Foreman remembers thinking that was a guy he could've been friends with, had circumstances been different.

He was so sure of Chase.

He was so sure of an image of a man that was so far from the truth it might well've been a lie from the outset.

Chase leans back. His injured arm remains safe in his lap but he spreads his fingers around that perspiring glass and strokes it as if it could tell his future. He stares into it as if the answers to life's questions could be found in the reflection of the ice that crackles against the clear, transparent liquid.

If only he were that transparent…

If only he could see right through himself…

He seems melancholy, now, as if the smiles have worn thin and the true meaning of this impromptu get together, against medical orders, is coming forth.

He looks sad. Defeated.

He looks like someone whose just been told that all hope is lost and in a sense, that's what he is.

That's who he is.

"House thinks I'm some great mystery, like to solve me would be as rewarding as solving the cryptic crossword in the newspaper."

"House treats everyone like his own personal puzzle, Chase. Don't take it personally."

"But there are no answers, are there?"

He looks up.

"There are no answers in me."

Foreman never noticed how long Chase's lashes were; how young he appeared when he looked directly into a person's eyes.

He never noticed the trace of a scar underneath his eye, slightly paler than the rest of his skin and old, an old scar, an old wound.

He finds himself wondering how he got it, finds himself caring how it came to be that Chase was hurt.

"There are answers," Foreman explains. "You're just going to have to work harder to find out what they are. House? House doesn't matter. This is all about you."

You and your scars, he thinks. You and your healing.

It occurs to Foreman that the only part of Chase that people have been able to see, of late, are his scars. The only visible things have been the evidence that he has fallen apart, rather than the evidence that he has re-emerged. He's hardly a phoenix, though, in this moment. He's just a boy that's learned he's supposed to be a man yet will have to grow into that role all over again.

"There's no magic switch that's going to suddenly turn everything back on, is there, Eric?"

"No. No, Chase, there's not."

And, then comes the honesty, even more brutal than before.

"How long before he tires of me? Where's the fun in the game if there's no resolution? What if he realises that he can't crack the code because there are too many important parts missing? Does he just kick me out? Cast me aside?"

_Throw me away, just like everyone else has?_

"Where will I go? I don't even remember where I live. I don't remember how to live."

He taps his head softly and Foreman feels ever wrap of his fingers.

"I'm just a student, remember? What would he want with one of those if there's nothing to gain from it?"

It's funny to think that he's so distressed over losing a man who nobody has ever truly laid claim to; that the whole be-all and end-all of his existence, at present, begins with a H and ends in an E.

"You can't 'win' with me," he says, softly. Laughs into his glass as he stirs those crystalline cubes around, again and again. "I'm too damaged."

"You're wrong."

Foreman takes the high-ground because he feels he knows best. At this moment in time he is the 'older' man offering guidance to the lost kid that doesn't know his place in the world.

"You're wrong, Chase, because the one thing you'll come to learn about House is that he never ever gives up. No matter how hard the challenge, he never gives in."

He'd fixate on the same thing until his last breath if it got the better of him.

Chase will learn that, soon enough.


	18. Chapter 33

L

_Again, thank you all for reviewing. Another person asked if this was going to turn slash and i can honestly say I have no real power over that. At present, Chase is too young. Too frail and emotionally damaged. In future, though? I really don't know. What go you think?_

_A small window opens in the next chapter. A bit of light floods in. Chase gives House something to be proud of, aw.  
_

**Part 33**

Night; It's a dark lit sodium world. Chase emerges from the fire of a cold sunset into a beautiful wreckage. Red is what is real, what is true. He looks at House and the colour appeases him somehow.

Red is the pillow that holds House's sleeping face and it reaches out. Images. Sounds. Music. He is with House and there is a silent journey. Magical. Maddening. Sulphuric.

He sees the other man's eyes flicker like a glitch in the reel.

He's not really sleeping...

"Where did Mr Fun Forum Foreman take you?"

Chase's whole world seems cinematic. Overlit. The narrative thread is weak, however, brittle and fragile. He closes his eyes. He searches for the directors commentary but there is none.

He stops smiling because he senses something wrong.

He leans on his crutch as he rests weight on the cast that still restricts him.

"Hey," he says, and only that. "We were just-"

He stops. Adjusts his glasses, looks confused.

"I-I don't know where we were."

"You're late."

The words come out as a bleeding accusation. Chase doesn't answer. He listens but says nothing. For a moment he turns, presses his forehead against the door. He closes it slowly, as if the careful way he moves might somehow erase his mistake.

"It's 2am. You said you'd be back four hours ago."

"Yes, I'm - "

" - Did he make you feel like a big boy?"

"He made me feel better."

"Did he make you feel like a real person?"

A look crosses Chase's eyes. Stricken. Struck.

"Isn't that what I am?"

House tells him he's a novelty. Pinocchio. He tells him that one day he might be a real boy but wonders if anyone will engage any more when he is.

House's face is red with emotion and_ that's_ real.

Chase shifts. Young. Scolded. He told Foreman to drop him off at the front and not walk him to the door because he wanted to feel responsible for himself. He struggled up three steps as Foreman looked on, desperate to help him but holding back to preserve his modesty. Chase struggled for nothing because House makes him feel like a disobedient kid.

"You're fascinating to his neurologist's mind."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because it's the truth. Aren't you always hammering on about the truth, Chase?"

The sulphur burns. He feels his _own_ cheeks redden, now.

"I had a good time," he tries to plead. "Is that a bad thing?"

"You had a few hours of theatre. Don't kid yourself."

Wilson would tell Chase that this is just House; that his feelings run deep and turn him rancid. Wilson would share the deep, wounding insults that stopped bleeding when he realised why House was throwing them out.

Because he doesn't know how to behave. To express.

Because his concern is so often masked in oil and bitterness; a defence mechanism, as such.

Wilson isn't here, though, so Chase suffers with bruising intensity and wonders why the man that has shown such compassion is turning it all around.

"You called Foreman," Chase says, delicately. "Four times."

"Because the idiotic moron didn't bring you back when he was supposed to."

It gets Chase's back up. It makes him feel trapped. Controlled. He's used to people staring at him nonchalantly unless his behaviour affects them.

He's used to Rowan's indifference and his mother's dissociation, to taking care of himself; looking after himself.

"I'm not a little kid, House."

"Of course. You're practically a man already."

"My birth certificate says I'm already there."

"It might as well say your father is Barack Obama, for all the good it is. You're on a tight schedule with your medication. Foreman knows that and so do you. Did he try to be all new age and offer you tequila instead?"

"No, he..."

"...what, didn't think? Of course he didn't. He just wanted to play the Good Samaritan by hanging with the brainless kid. God forbid, he should actually think beyond that. I bet he was smoking too, wasn't he? I can smell it."

He sounds like a jealous lover, a hysterical mother.

A wounded father, disappointed in his son.

Chase isn't used to that. He isn't used to being…regulated.

"He wasn't."

"Brilliant idea to take someone still recovering from a lung infection that landed him on life-support to a bar full of smoke..."

"House, it -"

"- and _you_, pretty boy with even less brains than before, do you have some crazy desire to burn yourself out before you can even feel the flames?"

The younger man sighs. His head hurts. His chest hurts.

He feels himself slipping and whispers "No..."

This is too much. This is something he's never had.

This is – discipline. Paternal discipline.

"You're not a man, Chase. You're nowhere near it."

"Why are you angry with me?"

"Because you're wasting my time if you ignore your limitations."

Because House does that, doesn't he? Because he practises what he preaches.

At first he wants to retaliate. To tell this man to fuck off.

At first, he wants to stare him in the eye and _dare_ him to do something.

"_Who do you think you are, Rowan?"_

He takes a deep breath. It shudders. His lungs hurt.

Then, he just accepts it, accepts the angry concern that he has never experienced before; relishes the punishing words of a 'father' he never had.

This is what Wilson would describe, a man that turns love and care into sarcasm and cruelty because it's so much easier to express, a man who could never be rational because his reactions are built on emotional blackmail...

"I'm sorry," Chase says, barely heard, because the last thing he wants to do is anger House; to push him away. "I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking."

He understands why House is so mad. Foreman even told him to expect it. He understands that House is putting more of himself into him than he ever has in anyone before, that this total care approach he's putting out is totally out of character.

Foreman told him that House has never seemed so human as he seems when he is with Chase, that he's never seemed so…invested.

It doesn't make the confusing entity of the man any easier to deal with, however.

When House puts a hand on the back of his neck and exhales deeply, he wants to drink in the physicality of it.

"Lets get you to bed," the older man says, calmer, now, having expressed his worry, his fear, his hours of life lived on edge. "You look like crap."

The only thing that Chase says is "Thank you."

()

"If you need anything, just call Wilson", House says, as he finalises the set-up with tape and wrapping.

He makes it secure, wishes he could make Chase himself secure.

"I'm sleeping on the couch. I'll hear you if you get up."

He means it comfortingly but it sounds like a warning.

Chase feels restrained, tied down by the IV line that will prevent him from moving all night as effectively as fastened handcuffs might. House left his crutches outside, left his clothes across the other side of the room leaving him feeling as though the other man is attempting to prevent escape.

Perhaps the door locks on the outside. He didn't notice, but just like the first time he opened his eyes, he feels he needs this.

Just like the time he pleaded with House to tie him back down for his own safety, this restriction feels to Chase like swaddling feels to a newborn.

He looks down at his immobilised arm and it bothers him, though. His eyes follow the line up to the clear liquid above his head. He swears he can hear every drip, drip, drip...

"You're late on your meds," House reiterates. "This is the quickest way of getting them into you. You know that. That's why we brought the equipment home."

"Still don't like it."

"Right. Because venipuncture is supposed to be enjoyable. Lying in bed with a tube in your arm is meant to be a hoot."

"Okay, okay."

"Your chest sounded congested, Chase. Be grateful I don't have you on oxygen."

He is dazed by the medication that will help his recovering body but do little for his mind, from the prescription sedative that helps his racing head to slow down to a stop. He opened his mouth slowly as House placed the pill on his tongue and told him to swallow. Did so.

He knows his body remains weakened by the infections that plagued it but he hates being do vividly shown how fragile he is, though.

"Get some rest," he is told. Ordered. "You should sleep until 10. I'll take the later shift and have them move your physio to after lunch."

So organised. So thoughtful.

"Okay."

"If you need to pee...hold it."

He doesn't feel House watching him silently from the doorway, his eyes lingering that little bit too long.

He doesn't hear himself calling out goodnight in the darkness.

"Think Phoenix," he says to himself quietly as he feels himself falling into the heat of uncertainty.

Think Phoenix, he says.

Rise from the ashes and the flames.

House closes the door and listens carefully, listens to those whispered words, listens to them slow down and then stop. Just stop.

He listens to a young man that has never had anyone to tell him what to do, never had anyone to tell him how to be and he's glad that he's given him boundaries.

He watched Chase rebel against his words. He watched him stiffen defensively as House told him how irresponsible and how stupid he'd been.

He watched him frown in confusion as the words had settled in – and then he'd watched him submit to the words, submit to the harsh disciplined tone of a man that actually cares.

"_I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking."_

I'm sorry, I didn't think I mattered.

Chase never cared about himself because he learned, early on, that he didn't matter and he made his choices based on this untruthful 'fact'.

He's mouldable, now. He's receptive. Perhaps an old dog can be taught new tricks.

Maybe in this reality, in this second chance, Chase will learn something different.


	19. Chapter 33b

_This is kind of a continuation of yesterday's 'post'. There's a little bit of brightness here and I hope it's not too daft. I just wanted to see Chase's pretty boy smile and his youthful enthusiasm for the smaller things in life. _

_I am glad a few people feel the same as I do, i.e. that it would just not be in character, at the moment, for a 'sexual relationship' to happen. There might be some kind of physical attraction on a base level and there might even be deep emotions (jealousy, possessiveness, even love…) but it just wouldn't be right. House would just seem like taking advantage. _

_I like things being gentle. If that's boring I really am sorry. I guess I just see 'sex' as a natural progression and at this moment in the story, it would not be a natural progression. _

**Part 33 (b)**

(*)

He dreams of vivid colours and sounds.

Tangible words.

Corporeal forms, all dancing around behind his sleeping eyes. REM sleep is an outlet. His brain ticks over with pictures projected onto welded eyelids. It's like an old movie, crackling into life.

He dreams of House's voice, loud and unfamiliar, telling him "Your Papa made a call…" and asking how the great R. Chase's son could ever fall out of favour with his old man.

He dreams of a bare office with only a table and chair and a man tasked to build a team by a woman that doesn't care how he does it.

He dreams of a hand outstretched with two nails painted black, a man he now knows saying "Pleasure to make your acquaintance and nice to know your taste in cufflinks is as good as my taste in ties!"

He can almost smell the sweetness of half eaten cherry pie sat discarded on a desk full of crumpled papers.

_He doesn't blow out at the interview. For all his Daddy issues and assumed nepotistic enhancement, he remains as cool as a wave-haired surfer, upturning each end of a sentence as though it were a question. His mate told him to take a Valium before the interview to keep his wits about him. Chase had looked at him sideways and told him "I'm Australian."_

_He turns up half an hour early and House is forty-five minutes late. The man is so infuriating he might well break through the laid-back veneer that Chase so carefully erects. He takes a deep breath and tries to hold onto his concentration. _

"_So, Pops impregnated a wholesome virgin and out popped you. Tell me, what does he think you'll bring to my table?"_

_Chase shrugs, perhaps forced, perhaps inspired by his own sense of frustration at this whole 'thing' being a preamble for an interrogation about his dad. _

"_Why don't you ask him? I haven't spoken to him in years. I expect you got more out of him on the phone than I got out of him since I was fifteen."_

_It was like a key finally turning. It was like a critic finally liking something he heard on a bland, indifferent album. _

_At first, House had looked apathetic toward him._

_Now, he looked intrigued…_

Chase wakes up _knowing_ something is different because it feels different; knowing that something has progressed because he feels euphoric. For a moment he simply lies still. He stares at the whiteness of the ceiling, at the peeling paint at the corners of the normally uninhabited room.

Then he simply laughs. Laughs, because the fog is still thick and the clouds are still covering but he might just have seen a glimpse of the sun peeping through.

(*)

"I remember the first day we met," he says, as House carefully removes the tape that holds his handiwork in place.

He slips the needle out carefully, trying hard not to pinch the skin when those words penetrate, pinch his concentration.

"So do I," House says, as he tries to contain the pounding in his chest in light of those very words; words he never thought he'd hear and words he never knew he wanted to. "Good for you. I'll give you a gold star."

Chase rubs his finger over the bridge of his nose. There's a slight mark where the rim of his glasses has been and he feels it even when they're not there.

He's smiling so freely, so beamingly, that it's as if he's won something.

"You were such an arse."

"Really? That couldn't _possibly_ have been me."

House stops what he's doing. He listens. Chase sits up in bed as if attempting to be closer to him. House remains silent, urging him without words to continue as he holds the cotton bud to the puncture site in Chase's arm, not wanting blood to spill out as well as words.

"You were wearing a grey suit jacket over some crazy skull and crossbones t-shirt. You were wearing a patterned tie over the top of the tee. I bit my tongue because I didn't want to make a bad impression."

He shrugs.

"Like I said, I'd heard you were a bit of an arse."

He remembers that, too. The words were spinning through his head even in the dream, that House was a maverick, a show-boater and, yes, an arse. That the genius that was Dr House was a Jekyll and Hyde personality, tentatively, unofficially diagnosed with some form of Asperger's Syndrome that never quite made it to print.

Be careful, he was told, because he eats young men like you alive.

He clears his throat. Now, he's laughing.

"You said Cuddy made you wear a jacket and tie for interviews but never said anything about a shirt."

She did. It was a protest.

He took her words literally because it's what he so often does.

"I realised what kind of a man you were in that moment."

"I never thought snap judgments were part of your personality."

"Oh, yeah."

It's odd.

It's odd, because Chase still has the mannerisms of his younger self, the comforting movements of a hand on the back of his neck, the same young look in those now-glowing eyes of his, but he's remembering a person he once was taking his first steps into the world which led him here.

"Jesus," he laughs, "I feel like I'm telling the future but it's the past. This doesn't feel like it happened to me but I saw it so vividly. It _felt_ real."

"What colour was the tie?" House asks. He's testing. He's probing deeper, seeing how much of this has been retained in the young man's memory.

He's seeing how big a first impression _he_ made on the boy.

Another thing Chase should've, would've been warned of is House's vanity and sense of self-importance.

"Red," he says, fittingly. "Black stripes. It was half way across your neck and I found it really distracting. I thought I'd messed it all up because all you wanted to do was talk about my dad. When I told you I didn't have anything to do with him, all of a sudden I was interesting."

He's not wrong. He's not wrong and he _knows_ he's not wrong, because House is trying to suppress a smile that says "thank you," "I'm proud of you."

A look that says, "maybe you're not so vacant, after all."

He remains stoic. Unmoved. Silent.

He remains tight-lipped and unaccommodating.

"So, was it real?" Chase asks, hopeful, desperately hopeful. "Tell me it wasn't just a dream."

House doesn't answer him but his look - his look tells Chase everything he needs to know.

"It was real," he says quietly, as if only to himself and again, just to solidify it. "It was real."

It feels like victory.

Pinocchio 1 - Prognosis 0.


	20. Chapter 34

_Again, another little part. Hope is not bad. I kind of like Chase's non-reaction to something which probably warranted, well, a reaction!_

**Part 34**

He feels oddly chastised when he arrives at the hospital. Strangely embarrassed, though for what he has no idea.

Chase can barely look at Foreman. He is the grounded teenager turned sheepish by the discerning words of the night before. He is unable to associate with his partner in crime. He smiles politely and raises a hand in acknowledgment but he can't bring himself to speak.

"Don't let him wear you down" Foreman calls after Chase and it's meant in jest, a joke between friends-that-never-were, never were but somehow are, now. "Tell him you have rights!"

Chase's oft changeable mood remains upbeat. He has beaten the system. He has defied the odds. He passes through physio with a strong sense of that; that small achievement, that little victory. It doesn't hurt as much today. It isn't so tiring. Hopeful, enlightened, he tries to force out more memories but his head is an empty space. He attempts to scour the recesses but all he hears are echoes, stirring echoes and the sound of his own questions. Still, he remains grateful for the tableau that was laid out for him, the still image that solidified and then animated as he slept.

The day seems fruitful. He glares at the doctor who wanted him stripped of his liberty but he answers all of his questions. He performs his menial memory tasks with playing cards and patronising praise. He does it all with a grimacing smile, all the while hating it with a passion and then he leaves.

His day is complete. Physio checked off and therapy done and dusted. House tells him to amuse himself; to occupy his time like a good little boy. There's a sensory room on the third floor he might enjoy. Good for the kids, he says, as well as for the mentally impaired. There's the crèche downstairs.

"Cuddy's kid's there. She's about your age, in the head."

Chase's smile is sarcastic.

The "Get real" goes unspoken.

"Go bug the ugly ducklings, Chase. Daddy has to work."

He ponders. For ten minutes, he tries to find somewhere to be but he just feels misplaced and out of reach.

Finally, at a dead end, he opts to spend time assisting Thirteen in the lab, tries to integrate in hopes of triggering something further. She asks questions about cell analysis, about antibodies, nods her head when he answers correctly. He gets the impression she would have made an informative yet difficult teacher and that the teenage boys would have had trouble concentrating during class.

"Are you even listening?" she asks.

He can't stop looking at her hands, not her breasts - those elegant hands that look so capable yet so strong. He thinks she could strangle as well as caress, that those fingers would be capable of destruction as well as pleasure.

She makes him nervous and he doesn't realise it's that natural intimidation a beautiful woman instils within a young man...

"Chase –"

"I'm listening, no worries."

"Well, listen harder. I've asked you three times, now, and you still haven't responded."

It's as if his brain, at times, slows down. It's as if the information simply takes its time reaching its destination.

He bows his head, hangdog, forlorn.

"I'm sorry. I'll try harder."

He holds a dish as she prepares the solution for it, watches as she mixes and combines. Her white, laytex fingers move rhythmically and he finds himself hypnotised by it; by the light, by the way it hits the water.

He lets his mind wander. As she speaks her words begin to fall away, as does the image of her. The edges become fuzzy and blurred as if they've fallen into that liquid, and as if Chase himself has.

He has no vivid picture but he does hear her voice, unclear at first but opening up in time like layers being peeled away to release sound.

He flutters. He blinks. He hears the words clearly but the meaning evades. It's not Thirteen speaking aloud in the present but her past voice returning to him in fits, in starts.

His heart skips. He wants this so much.

She says: "You're not borrowing my car..."

That's it. Just that. Five simple words. Five simple words with no connotations he can identify whatsoever.

_You're not borrowing my car._

He gets the impression it was more than a simple request on his part, more than a plea for a vehicle loan.

He ponders. He pushes but nothing comes.

Then she spoils it.

"Chase! Come on, focus. You're meant to be useful. You said you wanted to help."

"I do, I do..."

He touches her as he returns to her. This Chase is tactile. This Chase isn't afraid of contact. He depends upon it, at times, to ground himself back in reality when his mind has been wondering.

The way he blinks seems…intimate, without meaning to be.

_The way he breathes…the way he moves…_

"Easy, Tiger. This is a delicate procedure."

He stares for a moment, processing the words, before he pulls his hand back, burned and reprimanded.

"I'm sorry. I was just daydreaming. I guess I lost my balance, there."

"Yeah, well. If you fall, don't expect me to catch you."

Why would he ever?

This Chase smiles sweetly when mocked and blames his distraction on the great big hole in his head. Thoughts, he says, just fall out. The other Chase would never have dreamed of admitting such a thing.

He doesn't ask her the meaning of his recollection. He just repeats in his head, over and over, as if to hold the shard in place to build upon. Nothing else comes. The brain, he understands, holds fragments such as this. It logically pieces them together when it has all of the relevant parts. It stitches memories like patchwork to form a greater picture.

He can't force it.

He frowns, trying his best to do just that.

It's now that she realises he is losing focus entirely. She forgets he still tires easily; that he could sleep fifteen hours, if left to go through. He survived on such little sleep before. She wondered how he survived at all.

"Sit down", she says, as she snaps off the laytex. "It needs time to develop and I have something to show you."

He looks up.

Excited. Interested. Flirty, cheeky little boy.

"Really?"

He's an awkward flirt. It fits him just as poorly as the lab coat does, earns him 'a look'.

"You wish," she says, and he backs down, smiling playfully.

Chase likes visual aids. He likes things he can touch and feel and see.

She hands him two Polaroid photographs.

"I found them in my locker. I thought you might like them."

"I never look good in pictures," he asserts as he grimaces photogenically.

In one, he is staring aimlessly into space, a pair of goggles holding his hair back from his face. A digital clock in the background reads 0455 hrs and upon his face there is a look of desperate tiredness.

"A long night," Thirteen tells him. "You couldn't let go. I thought you were trying to outdo us all. It kind of pissed me off."

"Then, why did you take a picture?"

"To show you how obsessive you can get."

"I like to see things through."

She smiles, knowingly.

"You like to be right. In that case, you were."

"Yeah? Look at me. I look like a real doctor. Exhaustion and everything."

"You _were_ a real doctor."

It stops the smile for a second, her use of past tense, but he clears his throat and moves on.

"I guess..."

The second picture is of a charity event. It took place at Halloween. Chase is dressed as a vampire with his blond hair slicked back, sprayed dark. There is blood on his mouth, too red, frighteningly familiar of late.

"Imaginative," he says, though in truth he just raided his wardrobe and made precious little effort at all.

"I thought you looked hot. So did Taub."

"Good for Taub."

The truth to Chase is that he doesn't look particularly interesting. It's the woman on his arm that catches his attention with her blood lips and her familiar smile, with her low cut top and her satin cape wrapped around flimsy shoulders.

"House's intern," he says, as he touches her face. "She looks different."

It's wrong that he thinks of her that way. Its wrong that everyone knows what he doesn't. Thirteen plays with fire but there is no malice. She reveals a secret but it's only because she feels deserves to know.

"His intern. Yeah. Cameron."

His intern. His fellow.

_Your wife._

"Cameron?"

It's out, now. The skin has split and the infection can release itself. Thirteen doesn't see Cameron as an infection but a festering wound that could not be ignored.

"I thought you might like to know. I thought you _should _know."

Chase is quiet for a moment. He frowns as if in thought. His lips purse, and he swallows.

"Cameron?" he asks, again. His voice shakes, breaks a little and Thirteen is almost, almost sorry she did this.

Then he sighs. Recovers. He composes himself and bounces back.

"Ah. That _kind of_ explains all the people staring, I guess. It was probably what House would call a Jerry Springer moment."

She finds herself jumping to House's defense. She doesn't know why. It's not like she agreed with him in the first place but something tells her she shouldn't damage him in the face of a man who needs him so entirely.

She doesn't want to crush Chase. She doesn't want to crush House, either.

"He didn't want you set back. I thought it was a bad idea, but..."

But, she played along - until now. She's not out to sabotage but the moment felt right.

"I guess I thought I would've wanted to know. _You_ would've wanted to know."

He doesn't look upset. He just looks bemused. He stares at the picture but Thirteen notes his fingers have moved away from Cameron, now, as if he doesn't want to touch her. As if it doesn't feel _right_ to touch her.

"In the forty five seconds I saw her I could tell she was in love with House yet you're telling me I married her? Was I some kind of idiot or something?"

Was I a fool to not see what everyone else did or, worse still, to ignore it.

"She loved you too..."

"Like a labrador, maybe. Like a little brother."

It's how she'd smiled at him after all, as one might smile at a child or, worse still, a person with a few screws short.

"In some way, she loved you, and you thought that was good enough. For awhile, you were happy."

"For awhile..."

For a while, he lived an awkward lie. Then, it was over.

"For awhile I was clearly deluded and she was just making do. Jesus, is that why we broke up?"

"I don't know why you broke up. Love doesn't last, though. I know that and you know that. You just take it for what you can get out of it and then you accept it as a temporary thing."

Her take on love is as cynical as Chase's is idealistic.

His idea on marriage, however, probably matches hers. As the product of a broken home he has no idea why he married at all.

Thirteen touches him because she feels he needs her to. She feels no spark, never did with Chase, but it feels warranted. His eyes are so blue in this moment, as if bathed in the waters of clarity.

She hopes he doesn't drown in it.

"Look, Chase, are you going to be okay with this? I wanted to do the right thing. House is so-"

He looks at her. Smiles.

" – protective? I know. I'm glad you told me. He thinks I'm going to break but It's not like I can miss someone I have no memory of."

"She was your wife."

"Not MY wife," he replies. He almost says "his wife," as if that other Chase is a different man entirely but he knows how crazy that sounds.

"I don't feel anything at all. Not for her."

He wants to say his 'heart' still lies with Anne but he knows that was years ago. He wants to express the closest he came to a wife was a girl from back home who promised him the world. The memory of that girl strikes his chest where his 'wife' left him unmoved and thoughtless.

There's nothing he can say.

He rests in silence until it feels wrong then breaks it.

"Anyway," he says, as if moving on. He stops for a moment. Then, his face curls into a half smile.

Thirteen is looking for something that isn't there and his expression confuses her.

"What?" she asks.

He pauses for effect. He touches a hand to the side of his head where the hair is growing so lightly over the jagged scar she tells him to be proud of, rather than to hide.

"_What?"_ she repeats.

"I, uh…I wanted to ask if I can borrow you car."

He asks as though the joke means something to him. He's hoping it will make more sense if he plays with it.

"My car?" she asks. Then remembers.

"Oh, my car."

She smiles at the memory of Chase's utterly charming lack of ego; of the blond, blue eyed boy with the Prince William prettiness and the clueless, goofy charm who had no idea just how devastating he could be.

It's poignant, now.

He holds his aching arm close, sweetly susceptible, and Thirteen raises an eyebrow. She searches his face to see if he knows what he's saying, smiles cryptically when she notes he doesn't.

"You're cute, Chase, seriously, but you're too young for me. I don't do post-adolescent. So no, you can't borrow my car."

"Right," he says, though he's still none the wiser. "Thanks for setting me straight."

"I'll never lie to you. Even if it wounds your fragile, macho pride."

In this moment he realised that House might represent brutal truths but Thirteen represents emotionless honesty.

She represents a no-holds-barred approach that he gets the feeling he always, always appreciated.

She fits a function, in that sense.

Everyone fits a function.


	21. Chapter 35

_A step forward and a step back. _

**Part 35**

It's not a confrontation as much as it's Chase's opportunity for bragging rights. He never had many and how pleased he is when an opportunity presents itself.

How delicately smug he is when he announces to House: "I married your girl."

The words come out of the blue. Bluer eyes pass a look of confusion before settling upon denial. House is good at denial, has spent large portions of his life living in it. It's a dim colour but House camouflages well within it.

He denies his persistant use of Vicodin since Chase warned him off. He denies his shift patterns and his acutal hours in arrears...

"I'm an old man, granted, but I can promise you I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

The words are spoken in true Clinton style. He has the accent right, just not the mannerisms. Chase recalls nothing of the Lewinsky travesty but notes House looks oddly tense, though he tries hard to hide it.

"That woman?"

"That woman being Cameron's mother. Obviously. You married no girl of mine. I have no fatherless children."

When Chase rolls his eyes he sees flashes in the corners.

"That's not what I meant. I saw a picture of her. Of Cameron. Funnily enough, she looked terribly familiar."

_Gotchya!  
_  
"Oh, she did?"

Deer caught in headlights is no expression House would ever wear. He doesn't wear it now but he does feel caught. Caught out. Cornered by a kid in glasses with a goofy, giddy smile.

Chase seems overly happy with himself, the pupil finally proving the teacher is fallible and prone and as transparent as the next man.

He pushes. He sounds...cocky.

"She looked almost identical to the lady in the cafeteria. Your girl. The one you turned off with some crappy little cliche. Don't you think?"

"Yeah, I can see the resemblance. I'm surprised you can. Obviously, you were getting used to the glasses and let's not forget you're hardly reliable, these days. You had Wernickes tendencies not so long ago. I'm surprised you didn't mistake Wilson for your long lost wife."

He put up a barrier to save Chase from himself. It was a professional decision. Chase lacked the ability to deal with the loss of his marriage the first time round and the assumption was made. This time, he has not imploded. The sky has not fallen. He has not split or broken, has not succumbed.

Maybe House underestimated the kid, whose emotional intelligence seems greater now than it ever was, in terms of her.

"House, you don't have to hide things from me. I'm not made of glass."

"No, you're made of slugs and snails and puppy dog tails."

"That's what little boys are made of? Yeah, I know the rhyme, but I'm not a little boy any more."

That's debatable. Moreover, that's a bare faced lie.

He doesn't know what it is that makes him feel he should explain himself. He doesn't know why it should matter what anyone thinks of him when it never mattered before, but life is truly a box of chocolates and House is still adapting to the taste.

"The truth, little boy, is that I didn't want to see everything fall apart because you invested energy into the wrong woman again. It's happened once before and I'm a firm believer of learning from past mistakes. You, on the other hand, strike me as someone that doesn't learn. I bet Mommy had to spank your little ass time and time again."

Once bitten, never shy. It's wrong, however. Chase did learn.

He's learning now.

He repeats his earlier words as he gives House his respect and forgiveness.

"Like I said, I'm not made of glass. But thank you for caring."

He smiles.

House asks "Who said anything about caring? I'm aiming for an easy life."

It's his warped way of saying "You're welcome."

Chase might not be made of glass but he is precious as a gemstone, chiselled and brittle and so easily broken. He experiences his first 'head storm' that night. Severe. Blinding. Knives in his brain. House finds him hunched over and wordless, clutching his head and barely able to speak. His first thought is haemorrhage. His second sickening thought is that this could undo everything.

His third? It's selfish at best. He worries he has grown used to the way things are and to go back to living the ties free bachelor life is not something he is relishing or could even comprehend.

It's not that Chase gives him meaning, rather provides stimulation - gives him something to do.

He crouches down, though his leg doth protest. He tries to get a look at Chase's eyes but the other man won't let him.

"I'll call an ambulance," he says, though Chase shakes his head so vigorously it makes him feel those eyes are bleeding.

No, he says.

Just no.

He doesn't want the fuss and the drama. He just wants his head to stop hurting. His eyes burn into House when he manages to pry them open.

_Make it stop. Make it go away._

_Please. Help me._

House calls Wilson and demands his presence, Wilson, who has taken his 'vixen' to see Aida like a good boyfriend might. He plays the role well though at times he forgets the lines. He enjoys his part but fears the curtain call approaching and he's trying to get the best out of it while he still can. In his suit and tie he is handsome and operatic. He's dressed to kill and so is she in a plunging neckline and a pearl bead necklace.

The call is unwanted.

Here, House says. Now.

"House, it's a special day for us. You can't just demand I do your bidding because you feel like it."

House holds no sentimentalities in relation to a three month anniversary and threatens Wilson with all that is indecent and unholy if he isn't at his apartment within three minutes.

"This is insane. This is unreasonable even by your standards."

House hangs up knowing that Wilson will obey - and he does.

He's stood in the doorway with a bemused look on his face. Understandably, he wonders what is so unspeakably important.

Then he sees Chase, curled up and shaking, and his heart skips a little.

"You couldn't call an ambulance, House? Look at him."

"I needed to call you. He didn't want an ambulance."

"So now you start listening to what he wants? Jesus."

Anger is a strong emotion. It's virile and hard to contain.

So is frustration.

"If I needed a lecture, Wilson, I would have called Cuddy. I needed you."

Needed. Need. House needs him, and this is the only way he knows how to say it. It wears down Wilson's resolve. To speak in a somewhat romantic sense, it melts him a little, though his feelings for House are far from romantic. He loves him in the same way people love thunderstorms; destructive in their beauty yet fascinating and worthy.

He finds himself wondering how Chase loves him.

"You drive."

It's a command, not a request, and Wilson doesn't even question it.

They drive in ultimate silence but for the occasional hitching of Chase's breath. By the time they reach the hospital he has lost the ability to do even that.

His whole body is shaking.

He's whisked away directly for the attention of the neuro-surgical department because there can be no risks, no chances taken with a patient such as Chase.

Foreman tells House "Don't worry," and House asks "Who's worried? I just want to get home."

They test him thoroughly, scan his head and, upon noting no bleed, label it a post-traumatic migraine.

"It feels like death but it's just a head storm. There was increased activity in and around the area that's most affected by the scar tissue but there is no haemorrhage."

It seems so trivial, so benevolent but for the agony it leaves him in. His eyes shy away from light. It's so severe House suspects meningitis but he has no fever and the mandatory bloodwork is clear.

"Unfortunately, this is a common problem. He just has to ride it out. He's been pushing himself so hard to remember things that he's brought this on himself," Foreman says as he watches Chase vomit from the pain.

"He needs to take it easy."

House doesn't run to his aid this time, has a nurse clean up the mess. Chase is so weak that he can barely open his eyes, so agonised he cannot bear to be touched.

House curses his amateur dramatics but the joke doesn't reach his eyes because Chase could not act to save his life, especially now.

Wiilson just stands there, overdressed and out of sorts, as House metaphorically 'leans' on him, the awkward penguin and the wound tight shark. He won't leave. He hasn't been asked to stay but those words will never be said. House will never express that need but Wilson knows its there.

"Looks like a pretty bad one," the penguin says.

"You don't say," replies the shark, jaggedly sharp.

"Are you going to be able to deal with this tonight?"

House doesn't answer.

He shouldn't even be asked that question.

()

After merciless attention, Chase is discharged into House's care with painkillers and fact sheets and eyes that are swollen and red. Again, Wilson drives them home in silence only this time his eyes flicker to his rear view mirror as House literally holds Chase in the back seat. Surprising, it 'moves' him. The tenderness with which his friend keeps his young charge is progress he did not dare to imagine.

The hospital gave him ibuprofen, which is an insult, but wrote a prescription for something stronger. It's Wilson that carries him over the threshold as a husband might do for his wife, Wilson who offers to stay because House looks tired and worn and it's too much to do alone.

"Just get him in, get him sleeping and then we can talk."

Grown up stuff once the baby is in bed.

Adult talk.

He gets the feeling House just didn't want to be alone in case something went wrong and Wilson sees it as an act of friendship that he was the one called; that if House were to lose something that finally meant something to him he would turn to Wilson to pick up the pieces.

The drugs are strong and debilitating. They cannot be taken on an empty stomach. They cannot be injected. They do not make this easy. Neither does Chase, who cannot hold his head up, who refuses to open his eyes.

The idea of spoon-feeding one of his employees has never been anything that crossed House's mind but the need is here. It's just soup. Something to line his stomach. It's just microwave soup, nothing special, nothing fancy.

House holds him up, taps the side of his face as if to try to reach him. He is so far away that he cannot hear, doesn't want to.

"Open your mouth."

This is a father's job.

_God damn Rowan Chase._

"Listen to me. _Listen_."

Chase has hands like a man but as he raises them they're powered with the strength of an anaemic kitten. He tries to push House away. His eyes open and they are glassy with pain and fear.

He tells House in a voice that isn't even his to leave him alone.

It is hard. Seeing him like this after the morning's giddy cockiness is difficult. Seeing him reduced to this is as painful as him suffering it.

"It's soup. It's good. It'll help.

"_No_."

It plays with House's patience. It agitates him. He doesn't like to give a shit but somehow he does.

"Damn it, Chase, don't make me tie your hands. God help me, I will if you keep this up."

As a technique to establish obedience it's not the best. Wilson calls House's name in quiet warning but the threat works.

He holds the spoon carefully to Chase's lips.

"Open up."

At first, he turns away. Then, he tries. Slowly but surely, he tries.

"Not so hard, is it?"

Not so hard when House rubs his back as he swallows, as he tries his best to make this easier because it's hard enough as it is.

"Good," Wilson says. "You're doing good."

Wilson doesn't question the change in House when he silently wipes cracked lips, when he holds back and acts to prevent Chase from throwing it all up.

"Easy," he says softly. "You're wearing my favourite shirt and if you vomit I WILL kill you."

Again, slowly. He holds the spoon to Chase's lips as he touches his face. He waits for Chase to swallow before offering him that tiny pink capsule that will make it all okay.

It acts fast. It's pretty, in its colour and effectiveness and the minute Chase begins to relax House just wants to run. To run away. Trapped. Responsible. He considers it, considers leaving Wilson to take care of the sleeping victim but something holds him here.

He looks at Chase and he is a train wreck that House can't look away from. For a minute he is a boy again, back in that vehicle looking into the jagged abyss whilst the other kids scream and cry around him.

He jumps into it. He braves the abyss.

Wilson pulls the curtains drawn, blocks out the light as House lies there in silence, his hand pressed tight to Chase's head as he rests fitfully.

Chase looks so young and damaged. Now, House looks so calm, despite the chaos.

"I can stay," Wilson says. "We can talk."

House figures he needs to do this alone. Having dragged Wilson away he now just wants him to leave.

It's fickle, as he has always been.

"Just go. She's more entertaining than a cripple and a misfiring man-child. I bet she's waiting for you."

Quietly, he says "enjoy the sex while she's still attractive to you. It won't last long."

"If you need anything..."

"We can manage."

The 'we' is telling. Meaningful. The immersion is almost complete. It's necessary, for Chase. Perhaps even for House.

Wilson sees comfort in that necessity. In fact, he just sees comfort. One might almost say House was cradling the prone man that rests in his unpracticed arms.

He certainly isn't going through the motions


	22. Chapter 36

_Thank you for all your lovely reviews. As always, they are an encouragement. Thank you for the PMs, too. Tis always nice to share thoughts and thank people individually for their niceness._

_I've been getting a lot of the same review actually, not sure it's intentional or if it's someone who is just having trouble posting. They're from a person named 'Mou'. If you are reading, Mou, they're all posting just fine, thank you. I wasn't sure if you were having trouble and thinking they were not posting.  
_

_Just a small part in my state of hungover. Ugh. _

**Part 36**

There's something otherworldly about waking up in another man's arms as he sleeps without rest, crooked head leaning back on the couch as his legs spread out ahead of him.

House's cane is cast aside, abandoned like an unwanted appendage. His right hand rests on his leg as if even in sleep he can feel its presence taunting him, punishing him – as if it throbs even when his eyes are closed.

There is no rest for Gregory House, whose body is chaotic even in sleep. There is a pulse in that limb that never settles, a constant reminder to him that it is there and it is wrong and this is how his life will be until the day he no longer breathes.

He's never had balance to the pain in his body. Never, until now.

His other hand rests against Chase, holding him close, keeping him gathered in. He's another broken appendage, only this one will never be cast aside, will never be scorned like a useless limb. This one pulses even in sleep, too, but there are no taunts when it comes to Chase. It may well be that Chase is with House until the day he no longer breathes, too, but there's no punishment in that.

Chase's body rests against House's, cradled loosely in the other man's grasp. He's too weak to move, too tired to speak. His eyes are unfocused though pain medication and absent glasses but when he awakens there is no pain. There is only numbness where pain once was like an injection of Novacaine into the very centre of his head. It's packed with cotton wool, 'dumbed down', so to speak.

It's hard to think in this state but his first complete thought is for House, the man who dressed him, fed him and healed him, so shameful on his part yet so selfless on House's.

He sees lines of worry across the older one's forehead, prominent even in sleep. They ripple across in tension like cracks in the pavement where too much stress has been placed.

Too much pressure.

Too much weigh.

Chase is instantly remorseful for that, sorry for the discomfort he has caused and the responsibility that has been fast heaped upon a man who obviously thrived without it.

He's so sorry. He wants to apologise but he can't find the words. He wants to seek forgiveness but he can't find the strength. He opens his mouth as if to speak but his brain protests and renders him silent.

Dumb and wordless.

He feels muddled and confused, befuddled and prone and there may be solace in an older man's arms but not in his own head. His body jerks a little, that full range of emotions fighting to express themselves doing battle inside.

His body's response is electrical and the motion passes through him as if he were 'live'. Immediately, House 'earths' him, brown to Chase's blue. His own motion is to clench his hand in response around Chase's arm, to pull him in tighter.

"Go back to sleep," House says solidly, without even opening his eyes. He doesn't want to move. He doesn't want to risk destabilising the structure now that it's holding up, now that it's no longer crumbling. Beyond all that, he simply doesn't want to move having finally given way to sleep and some depiction of comfort, if that's what one might call this.

"Go back to sleep," he repeats and, as if reading Chase's mind, adds "you can pay me back in the morning."

The implication is that this is not done for free because that's what Chase needs. The underlying meaning is that this is a favour and that House will demand it be reimbursed. It's what Chase responds to best, the thought that nothing is free and that nothing he does or expects could ever be considered 'taking advantage'. It's such an ironic personality trait for the kid they all called 'rich-boy'; for the young man they assumed simply received without having to work or repay.

Chase stares at House for a moment through the liquidity of his gaze; stares at this man who holds him, this man who suffers for him when nothing in the world dictates that he should.

He watches this man who sacrifices his own comfort just so he can feel safe and feels a pain in his chest so deep and so striking it almost takes his breath away.

It strikes him.

House strikes him, strikes him as a man who paints the picture of hectic and unstable yet is the only thing that keeps Chase balanced and there's something strange about that. There's something _private_ about that, as if this is the side to the man, the side to the coin that nobody ever flips – the side to the person that only the privileged get to see.

"Quit staring," House whispers, and again his eyes remain closed. He sensed himself being watched, being appraised by drug-hazed eyes and a young man's uncertainty. "As irresistible as I am, I'm not your boyfriend."

_God forbid. _

Chase gathers himself up and he settles. He rests his head against House once more and his eyes slip shut, contented and safe - protected and unafraid. His past doesn't come back to him in fits and fragments, nor does it tease him with single words and shooting images.

He just rests. Quietly. Silently.

Dreamlessly, even.


	23. Chapter 37

_Again, a tiny part. Hopefully not crap. More a "what do you mean to each other?" chapter than anything else…_

**Part 37**

"Why you? Have you ever asked yourself that question?"

"Other than my other-worldly wit and my attractive bone structure?"

He jokes. He always jokes but, joking aside, he has wondered. It's one of the great mysteries of 2010. He has asked himself why anyone would cling to him by choice, why anyone would reach out in blindness and find a man like himself. He has asked himself how anyone could look at him, imperfect vision aside, and shape him into something close to important when he is a human non-entity.

Wilson pushes forth, desperate to know what incited the unholy alliance that is Dr Gregory House and Dr Robert Chase.

"You're hardly father material. You care about your TV shows more than you care about the lives of your patients. If anyone was destined to shirk responsibility is you and yet here you are, waiting in a hallway until he finishes his psych appointment."

Wilson is just trying to understand. He's trying to diagnose whatever is wrong with the world if this is what it comes up with.

"What do you think made him turn to you?"

"Baby bird and duckling syndrome," House explains, as though it's the most obvious thing in the world. He taps his cane on the cracked flooring as he contemplates his own conclusion.

Wilson processes the words but not the metaphor; the rhyme but not the reason.

"Duckling syndrome? What is that, some new and invented psychological condition that you've dreamed up?"

"Sure. It makes sense."

"_What_ makes sense?"

The confusion is clear. Wilson folds his arms across his chest as chestnut eyes blaze in confusion.

House almost sounds convincing when he puts forth his argument.

"When a duck or a chick hatches out if it's shell, the very first living image it sees imprints on it. It adopts it as it's protector, so to speak. Haven't you ever seen stories about zookeepers shoving in a stuffed penguin for the abandoned baby penguin to warm to? The little chicks hatching in an incubator in the presence of a tiger as some warped Nazi-esque experiment?"

He leans over and steals the remainder of a pack of mints from Wilson's pants pocket as he renders him silent.

The quiet violation doesn't go unnoticed but Wilson doesn't protest, doesn't respond at all.

House places something small and white on his tongue and says "I was the first thing he saw when he was re-born."

He gives a look that means something, though that meaning is unclear.

"I practically delivered him."

Delivered him from destruction, from death.

Delivered him from life as an orphaned, guilt-ridden murdering divorcee.

Delivered him from evil, in a lot of ways. One time, not so long ago, House tried to kill him – yet, now he's delivered him unto the world as if he birthed him, himself.

"So, you're father to a wayward duckling, is that what you're saying?"

The name somehow fits, now.

For Wilson it's an enduring image, Robert Chase emerging bloodied and vulnerable from an underground birth canal straight into House's dusty, dirty arms.

"Duckling syndrome," Wilson says under his breath, but the words make sense.

Chase's emotional fixation with House never will, though, despite the somewhat plausible explanation.

Chase is asked the same question by a psychiatrist he doesn't trust in a room he doesn't like. Too small, he thinks. Too bright. It's too clinical, and the tray in the corner leads Chase to believe that any indiscretion will go chemically punished; that such 'weapons' are put on show to intimidate and to control.

Chase doesn't like to feel intimidated, doesn't like to feel controlled.

He doesn't like a unit that's accessible through locked doors and keypad combinations even if he isn't an inpatient.

He doesn't like this man, who speaks to him like a child and questions every motive, every inch of his life, every segment of his waking world.

"Why House?" he is asked, and the words make him instantly defensive. "Do you feel you might be looking for something in him?"

A replacement father?

_Something more? _

He sees it as an insult, a slight on his young reputation. It's not that he's against it but he's learned from so many sources that rumours such as that can end a career.

His is so fledgling it hasn't even started. Or, re-started.

He shifts. His body language is conductive of someone being forced to endure, who holds himself in so entirely it's as if there is armour built around him.

"What do you_ want_ from him?" the doctor expands.

"I'm not gay, if that's what you're saying."

The doctor doesn't want to alienate the patient, doesn't want to turn his mood. It's a critical time for him and he doesn't want to force a state of discomfort. His progress had been hindered by those blinding headaches; by his own lack of restraint.

This man doesn't want it hindered by stepping off on the wrong foot.

"I'm not questioning your lifestyle choices, Chase."

Use the name, he learned. Personalise the encounter.

"That's not what I'm saying. I'm trying to establish the nature of your...attachment."

"My _attachment_?"

The doctor lacks a better word. 'Dependence' would bother Chase because he's so terrified of being devoid of control. 'Relationship' would be too intimate as Chase lacks the maturity to see beyond a label.

It's so hard to accommodate a young man's fragile psyche.

"Let me rephrase that. What do you think he offers you that benefits your recovery?"

Chase thinks.

Explains.

"He makes me feel comfortable. Is that so bad?"

"No, it's not bad. It's helpful."

"He makes me feel clearer, and God knows I need that, right now."

House is the only one Chase can relate to. He doesn't recall him on a truly conscious level but the gut instinct is that he can trust him.

He hasn't had the same feeling toward anyone else.

"I guess I get the feeling we're similar in a lot of ways."

The out of place seek familiarity.

In a foreboding world, like seek like and the duckling seeks the comforting arms of the tiger because that's just how things are.

"Do you ever worry you're becoming a burden?" the doctor asks, and it's a loaded question. Loaded, but genuine.

He's trying to establish Chase's current state. He's trying to establish where he is in his own head. He's already established his orientation and his grasp on reality - now, he's attempting to grasp any negative feelings that need to be addressed.

Chase is rendered silent by the question.

A look crosses his eyes, dark, shadowy and perhaps a little wayward. He frowns as he ponders the word 'burden' - as he tries to define it and place himself within it.

"He took me home," he says, finally, as if he has justified it to himself. "It was his idea. If he wanted me to leave he'd say so, wouldn't he?"

It's a question, not a definitive statement.

He bites his lip as he waits for the doctor's response.

His need for reassurance is fierce and strong.

"I'm sure he would," comes the quiet answer, and yet Chase cannot help but think it's patronising; four words uttered just to pacify him.

"You're not going to start thinking of him as a burden?" Wilson asks outside as he sits with House, as he waits with him.

House slides another one of Wilson's mints into his mouth, tucking it into the side as he relishes the taste of stolen goods.

"I don't think of_ you_ as a burden, do I?"

A stop. A start. Wilson looks taken aback and a little insecure.

"I'd hope not…"

"Well, he's prettier than you. He's more polite _and_ he laughs at my jokes. What makes you think I'd ever see him that way?"

He wouldn't, doesn't, but a seed has been planted into Chase's head, now, and there's nothing House will be able to say to stop it from flowering.


	24. Chapter 38

_Truly sorry for the overload _

**Part 38**

The day doesn't go entirely House's way. Its stuttering and problematic, a jagged day where the edges are sharp and every which way he turns, something grinds him to a halt.

Days like this are not made for House, not when Wilson orders chowder for lunch with a gleam in his eye that suggests a purposeful tactic to stop House from stealing his food. It seems overtly cruel, to House, for his 'friend' to disallow him his one life's pleasure.

Cuddy disallows him from ordering a radical neurological procedure on a patient who, House believes, might as well not live without it, forever trapped in a world of useless and unfulfilled. She states she'd be risking his life, an odd choice of words when the man's 'life' is not a life at all.

"I might be risking his life," House says, "but if I couldn't wipe my own ass at the age of 27 I'd rather someone cut MY head open even on the off chance."

He notices her flicker but she doesn't cave and, inevitably, House knows he's fighting a losing battle.

He wipes his hands of the matter and tells Cuddy that his carrot and potato persona is on her head.

Thirteen informs him quite casually that she requires extended leave to carry out a 'personal matter' which he can only assume has to do with the fact her time for personal matters is ticking by like fast flowing sands. He tries telling her that a certain pretty blond whose hair is coming back even blonder values her company and might cry himself to sleep if she left but, even stooping that low doesn't sway her desire to Be Gone, in coming days.

"He's your pet," she says, matter-of-factly, "not mine."

House wanted to remind her of Chase's last night in ICU when she spent hours petting his downy-hair as if he were _her_ pet, a nestling bird on crisp, white sheets, but he chooses not to.

Taub gets the better of him in a diagnosis, which, in itself, is tantamount to Hell freezing over. Then there is Chase - Chase, who is quiet and withdrawn where he'd been chatty and thankful this morning, who is sheltered and evasive where he had been a wide open book the minute he disentangled himself from House's wiry embrace.

Chase, who can't even look at House, his mind so cluttered and occupied with something that was said to him because he often fixates on words meant to pass.

The word, it seems, haunts him. It plays upon him like a voice bouncing from wall to wall, over and over, wicked and invasive.

_Burden._

The doctor meant no malice, was attempting to assess, but the lingering thought remains. Is that what he is? Is that how House sees him?

His face reflects his mood. House may pretend he's no connoisseur of human emotion but his mind is tactile, reaches out for clues and then analyses them.

"Well, you're a bundle of laughs, aren't you? What did they do to you, perform a lobotomy?"

Chase tries to be 'cool' as he says "It's nothing."

"Nothing. Right. Well, then, if it's nothing just forget I even asked. Absolve me of my responsibility to ask, in fact. That is, unless you're acting like a hormonally challenged teenager as a ploy to _get_ me to ask?"

Chase doesn't answer. Like the hormonally challenged teenager House accuses him of portraying, he simply stares at a spot on the wall that's only marginally more interesting than the spot on the carpet he'd previously been giving his full attention to.

He's not demanding. He's not coercing, but his mood is somewhat questionable.

House chooses to ignore, tries to prep him for a shot, as is customary. He knows well enough that Chase dislikes the sting of the needle so, as he reaches for it he is jibbering in distraction.

"You know, Wilson is showing teeny tiny signs of jealousy. He thinks I care more about you than him."

He incites Chase to play upon it because "there is nothing more cliché than a resentful Jew".

"Thirteen's moving to Vegas to be a cocktail waitress or a cocktease or…something, and poor old Taub. Poor Taub thinks that a Head of Department job is somewhere in his hairless horizon. Obviously, I've sent down a psych referral so I guess you're not the only mentally challenged one after all."

He can do this without thinking. The liquid is dragged up into the chamber and each and every flick of House's finger against the glass makes the meds bubble less but Chase bubble more.

He blinks, his eyes full with the pressure of thought.

"Which leaves you. What about you, my RAM challenged laptop? What mind-numbing tasks did they have the performing seal partake in today?"

When House reaches for him he pulls his arm away, a staccato movement that jars and takes House aback. It's as if he's pricked his finger; as if he's burned his hand. It's as if House's touch causes him pain and his eyes are brimming with distress.

He doesn't answer House's question. He just looks away, suddenly shy, instantaneously ashamed.

"Its okay," he says, softly. His eyes move towards the loaded syringe in House's grasp. "I can probably do that myself."

His words are certain but his tone is fragile.

His voice is definitive but his eyes are pleading and sad.

"What's the problem?" House asks.

Chase's face bleeds shame in red streaks across his cheekbones. Against the redness, his eyes look impossibly blue though the contrasting colour brings out those subtle flecks of green, jade beneath the sea and, as he blinks, those oddly dark lashes cast crescent shadows.

They're mirrored only by the shapes frustrated fingernails have left in his palm, crimson and dark and as arched as his thoughts are.

"There's no problem. I just think I need to start taking responsibility for myself. I'm quite capable of giving a shot. It's one of the first things I learned."

He omits the fact that, as a young man he was taught how to inject his gradually worsening mother, whose chaotic behaviour patterns landed her in the hands of Mental Health specialists who pitied the boy but felt he needed to be prepared.

"Is this what you've been learning in physio? I would've thought stress balls and dumbbells would've been more the beginner's style."

"No, we've moved on from that, now."

"What kind of hospital is it, teaching its patients how to treat themselves? Giving them a mind of their own isn't part of the deal, is it?"

Chase, again, doesn't answer. There are words held prisoner within him, captively incarcerated by his own force of will.

He will not give in. He will not offer himself into House's seemingly willing hands when those hands might not be willing, after all.

Chase requires no pity, no obligation.

Chase doesn't want to be a weight on legs that can barely carry House's himself, let alone a man who has forgotten how to be a man.

"House," he begins, but he's cut off before his plea can even be born.

"What's on the menu tomorrow? _Brain_ surgery? Perhaps they'll have you performing your own CT scans from now on. Wouldn't _that_ be fun?"

"No. House, please. I just - "

_I just want to learn to take care of myself so that you don't have to. _

"Oh, don't be like that. First step, you carry out your own injections which, I might add, will be virtually impossible for you when your arm's still compromised and you've as much strength in it as Britney Spears has brain cells left. What next? This time next week you'll be self medicating _and_ self-catheterising. Speaking from experience, that's not something you want to be doing."

"I don't need catheterisation."

House stares him deep in the eye, a confrontation, a challenge.

"You will if I call you out for being an idiot and put you on bed rest out of spite because you're refusing treatment and I think it's for the best."

He looks so smug when he says "I can do that. "

Chase is quiet. Forlorn. He doesn't want this fight. He doesn't want this argument. He wants to go back to the way things were but, what if that doctor was trying to tell him something? What if he was trying to be kind by giving him a pointer in the right direction?

"I'm not refusing medication. I'm offering to do it myself."

"-which is a joke. Must I remind you why you're here in the first place?"

"I don't need reminding."

Then softly, as if he doesn't quite believe his own words, he adds "I don't need to be here. I'll be fine on my own."

If Chase were any good at analysing body language he'd see that he has truly 'turned' House. His arms fold tightly across him. He appears…patriarchal. Dominant.

Insulted, even, by the insinuation that he is not 'required'.

His eyes are the hottest part of the flame and Chase can feel them searing into him with a heat he hasn't experienced in a long, long time, not since his days of bad behaviour whilst trying to forge Daddy's attention.

House's lips are tight. Thin.

"Fine. Right. Like you were fine last night?"

"That was a one-off. Besides, you don't want me cutting into your home-time if I'm going to start acting like a broken child."

His voice trembles, ever so slightly. He's so bitter with those words, so bitter that House tries to quell the flames; tries to draw out some of the poison that Chase is injecting into himself.

He throws his hand in a gesture that says "don't be foolish" in the hope that his uncertain reassurance will be enough to put out the approaching inferno.

"Chase, you're nothing but a poor, permanently concussed puppy dog and as long as you don't pee on my _woefully_ expensive carpet then you're more than welcome to stay."

As an afterthought, he adds "Besides, we're all broken children."

He reaches for his 'patient' again only this time Chase's movement is more violent. His face reflects that, reflects the dissolution of his own sense of certainty as he attempts to shift the power balance in his favour.

"I don't want to be your cross to bear any more than I need to be. I already played that part and I sucked at it."

"You did?"

"I've never been any good at being somebody's child and I'm pretty sure you don't want me to be yours."

The words are like a blood-red cloth to a charging bull because House's own issues run just as deep but he'll be damned if he lets them carve him out.

"Oh, here we go. Poor, abandoned Robbie pushes at anyone who tries to do good by him because Mommy and Daddy didn't love him enough. It's a useful tactic. Now, you can go through life without ever having to get over your pathetic childhood trauma."

"It defines me, doesn't it?" Chase asks, helplessly. "Didn't you once tell me that?"

It's another flickering memory of House throwing those words upon him in malice, in burning frustration.

House recognises this trait, this passive-aggressiveness that so often made Chase ugly in his beauty. So often he's seen it in the young man and so often he has mocked it and twisted it into a weapon to beat him with.

The brutal fact is, Chase woke up in his arms this morning, as helpless as a newborn child. It's only fitting, therefore, that he attempts to regain a little independence. House understands it – but, it doesn't mean he'll give him an easy ride.

Under his breath, the 'boy' whispers "I just don't want to be a burden, alright?"

It's the straw that breaks the camel's back and the kicker is that the camel's back was already fractured in three places and that's not even accounting for spinal cord injury…

"Fine," House snaps, "You want to help yourself? Go ahead. Be a martyr. Be a brave little Pinocchio. Go through life pretending you don't need anyone and see how far it gets you."

"Isn't that what you do?"

"It is. Or, it was. Look at me now, the wrong side of fifty and, correct me if I'm wrong, but other than your darling wife I haven't noticed anyone trying to break their own necks trying to get intimate with me. It may well be because I'm too highly elevated in their opinion but I get the sneaking suspicion it's because I'm a prized jerk-off and I've burned all my bridges."

This is meant to be a lesson. These words, they're designed to break through the barriers.

Don't use me as a role model, he's saying.

_Don't make my mistakes. _

Seemingly, they just make Chase more determined though there was a moment's hesitation, as if he was battling with himself, with House's words and with the task at hand.

The task wins.

House watches as he silently fumbles with his weakened arm, attempting so valiantly to tie the tourniquet; to prove that he's right to be alone, that he's correct to shy away from 'need' no matter what House tries to tell him.

"See how far you get," House says, as he takes a step back; as he lets go of the bicycle just to see if the boy can stay upright without his arms to stabilise him.

Chase breathes deeply. All the while, his hands are shaking but his face shows the determination that House always valued in him, his fine young protégé. He gets the feeling Chase would hack at himself, burn himself, slice open his own veins in protest as he tries his best to prove a point.

House wonders who he learned that from…

Deep down, Chase knows how to do this. His movements are educated. House watches with intent, watches how he moves for the vein so prominent beneath the skin, how he tilts the needle at the angle required for ease of penetration.

He watches him try once. He sees the quiet aggravation as he tries twice, three times, all the while breaking the skin until his arm is dotted with tiny red insults that spill out every time he 'fails'.

He watches him mutter under his breath, curses that don't resemble anything he's ever said before and which House believes are imported from Australia, flown in from Down Under and stored with tender love in Chase's hidden little mind; the mind he shares with nobody but those privileged to be allowed inside.

It's fascinating to watch his inner battle coming to life right before watchful eyes.

It takes nine tries before those hands fall, before those shoulders shift and before that determination fades into something akin to defeat.

"Fuck."

House feels his stomach clench a little at that one uttered word. He wants to let Chase have his moment of teenage rebellion but he won't let him hurt himself, not even when the path is paved with good, if bloody intentions.

He reaches over and this time, Chase doesn't pull away.

"I don't want to be a burden," he whispers as House wipes away those thin traces of blood on the inside of his arm, as he cleanses him so gently it's like feathers and fingers and pulses on his skin.

He inserts the needle without even causing him pain and as he injects the liquid into those tormented veins it's without so much as a smug word.

"If I wanted you out," he says, as he 'finishes up', "I'd tell you."

He pulls up Chase's arm and holds it as the bleeding stops. Chase looks humiliated. Embarrassed, still.

"I thought you might be being polite."

"Polite? Me? All that proves is that you clearly don't remember me."

"I thought you might be sorry you ever brought me home."

Never.

The fact is, Chase has given him something to come home _to_.

"If I thought of you as a burden I'd get rid of you. I don't pity fools, Chase. If I offer you anything at all it's because I want to give it to you."

It's blunt.

It's necessary.

"The minute you overstay your welcome I'll let you know and if you know me at all, you'll know that's the God's honest truth."

He releases the tourniquet from Chase's arm.

Chase releases breath he didn't even realise he'd been holding.

"Thank you."


	25. Chapter 39

_Again, overkill. Dreadfully sorry. It's ironic. I've lost all confidence in what I write but I can't stop writing. Hmmm._

**Part 39**

After such a long while walking that fine line between Christian and Scientist, Chase wonders if this truly is the job for him for in all its clinical sterility, it lacks the spirituality he came to need way back when.

It lacks the fundamental enlightenment he always felt he needed, be it in the form of answered questions or celestial satisfaction.

Chase always valued knowledge. He also valued faith. When his faith failed him at an important time in his life he focused all of his attentions on learning – but, did he neglect all else because of that? He ponders it now because he came so close to death in this place that it may well have brought him closer to God.

God doesn't make this any easier.

ICU means something more to him now that he has 'suffered' it. It's a memory of excruciating pain and unbearable confusion, of drowning in one's own disorientation. It's a place of insufferable monitoring and invasive procedures, of mechanicalised bodily functions and removal of free will. He can't imagine inserting a vascular line into somebody without wincing with the knowledge that those things burn when pulled out. He can't fathom telling a patient to 'relax' whilst their gag reflex protests against the thick, plastic tube that rests in their airway because he knows how difficult that is.

The last time he was here he was the patient, not the doctor, and it's difficult to 'go back' once he's seen the other side.

He find himself rubbing his wrist subconsciously with the memory of being restrained and blinking fast just to make sure he still has control of the reflex.

"This is your Kingdom," he's told, because this guided tour is something his therapist thinks will help; that immersion in his 'old life' might just help him reconnect.

"I don't like this place," he admits, as he falls in behind the doctor he once worked alongside and whose face looks familiar and whose name badge saves him the humiliation of being unable to recall his moniker. He doesn't walk well on one crutch but he's getting better.

"Nobody likes it," the Intensivist, Neil, tells him, "because, a fair proportion of the people we treat die regardless of what we do for them. It was your haven, though. You thrived here when you assisted."

"I can't imagine that."

"You were always good to have around. You had a calming influence on the conscious patients. You talk straight. We pussyfoot around so much they sometimes need that."

"They don't need to be lied to or spoken to like children."

He might as well be speaking of himself. He's starting to notice the mistruths, now, those gaping 'fibs' that are meant to help but only hinder.

"Well, there is that."

He looks at the beige-walled room and feels panic rising in his chest, as if this were the scene of a crime rather than the scene of his own healing prowess. He remembers vivid fever dreams and night terrors brought on by the anaesthetic agents used to keep him sedated. He knows how common a Hellish scenario can be in this place, especially for those with traumatic brain injury.

He understands the maddening properties of continually infused Propofol, has experienced the white storms it causes inside of absent minds.

"The place just makes me feel edgy."

"It's natural. You were stuck on the other side of the glass. You were the specimen, not the scientist."

"Great choice of words."

He sees a patient on life-support, a forty-seven year old male with a serious closed head injury following an assault. He arrived with a GCS of 3/15 and it never got any better. His notes state it diffuse atoxal injury with increased ICP. The bolt sticking out of his head looks grotesque. Due to the treatment given to him, his kidneys are damaged beyond repair. He's blind. Paralysed, due to spinal cord severance.

The man, it seems, has little to no chance for survival, and his CT scans show such little activity he might as well be brain dead.

"You were lucky," Neil tells Chase. "You lost your memory. Maybe you lost a bit of yourself. You lost a few years of your life. This is the best it gets, for him."

The family are refusing to terminate life-support. Chase wonders if his wife would've done the same for him if he'd been so badly injured there was no hope whatsoever.

He wonders if anyone would've fought for _his_ life.

He looks at this poor man and wonders if he would've wanted anyone to.

"I get to re-live my adult years," Chase comments. "I get to rectify all my stupid mistakes."

He made many. He feels blessed, in a way.

"What does he get?"

The answer to that question is nothing. Nothing at all.

"He gets our care until his family realise they're holding him here against his will."

Neil sees the alarm in Chase's eyes and knows this patient has hit him close to home. He knows he's looking at him in all his undignified stillness thinking "that could've been me."

He attempts to change the subject though he knows such a sight is difficult to erase; such a thought is difficult to quash.

"You did a lot of work with the neonatal unit. You always seemed at your best with kids. I was surprised you didn't have any of your own but, then, I was surprised you were a day over 21. You don't know how many patients questioned your expertise."

The man smiles good-naturedly as he runs his hands over his greying, balding head.

"Wish I had the same problem. You're, like, four years younger than me."

Chase smiles, disarmed by the man's flattery and efforts to break the ice that people tread so thinly around him, these days.

"I bet you've never been embarrassed on a date when the doorman's asked you for ID and turned you away when you didn't have any."

"Dr Chase, I haven't been asked for ID since I was sixteen years old."

_Dr Chase. This man used his 'title', didn't demote him like everyone else. _

_Dr Chase. It doesn't even sound right. _

"The grass is always greener, right?"

"Yeah, we always want what somebody else has."

They laugh. They laugh through the bleakness of this place and Chase realises that this is how doctors in such circumstances get by. Through humour. Through banter.

Through the realisation that there is always someone worse off than yourself.

As Chase looks at that poor, already-dead man having life breathed into him by a machine he's happy, at least, that it's his friends that are breathing life into him.

(*)

"I don't want to be a doctor."

He went through this phase at the precise biological age his mind functions at, right now, 20 years old and wondering if his chosen 'vocation' is truly what he wants at all.

He'd read articles his father wrote in magazines and books, so much thought and time and effort put into them, and he'd scowl, knowing he never put so much thought and time and effort into his family.

He'd read of his father describing "Patient B" and would envy him or her for being graced with the focus and attention of a man who should've been focusing and attending upon him.

He remembers his room-mate at school asking him if he realised the minute he qualified would be the minute he said goodbye to normal life and adopted the hospital as his wife, his lover, his child and his mother.

"It doesn't feel like me."

Foreman stops eating and paints on his 'serious' face. Chase recognises it by the way his eyebrows meet in the middle and his whole mouth becomes rigid, as if the pressure and effort of putting together a thought causes a physical response in the man.

"You've had a rough time," Foreman confirms, "and it's natural to start looking at life differently, but do you really want to throw all this away? It was your whole life, man."

_It was your whole life. _

"That's the point."

It was the point he had, all those years ago, when he skipped lectures and practicals for two full weeks before his mind cleared and he realised there was nothing else he wanted but to save lives; to save more lives than Papa did just so he could shove it in the old man's face.

The old man's dead now, though.

Who is there left to prove anything to?

He pushes a tomato around the plate for the third time. He's still not eating, still losing weight – still being threatened by House with forced feeding if he doesn't get his act together, but he doesn't pay heed, doesn't listen, despite his need to please.

This 'phase', for Chase, is doing what he 'feels' like and avoiding what he doesn't.

"You worked hard for this," Foreman tells him. "I gave you a hard time when we first started working together because I thought you got this job because of who your dad was."

The slight snort is telling, from Chase, but he carries on listening.

"You never really denied it. You just let people think the worst of you. It was only when I got to know you better I realised you fought for this just as hard as I did and you're a damn good doctor."

"But, is it what I want? Look at you, Foreman. Look at House. You have work. You have patients. But, what else do you have?"

You don't have a life, he's saying. You don't have love.

Foreman remembers a conversation he had with a patient about this very thing, doesn't remember what answer he gave him because that answer doesn't really mean anything to him.

They were just words.

"I want to get married. I want kids, one day."

"Taub's married. You were married – "

Even when he says the words they backfire on him. Chase raises an eyebrow as he contemplates the loveless, open marriage of a middle-aged former Barbie maker; as he passes thought on his own dead tie.

"Okay, bad examples, but look at Neil. You spent time with him today. He didn't seem too 'off', did he?"

"No – "

"He's got three kids. Two girls and a boy. He's got a wife that he thinks is beautiful. He juggles home and work life and he does a good job of both. It's not impossible."

"No, but it's unlikely. I didn't manage it the first time."

"That was Cameron. That wasn't you. You gave it your best shot."

Chase takes a sip from his orange juice and it tastes bitter on his tongue. It's tang awakens him.

"It's not just that, Eric."

He's been calling him by his first name, lately. He thinks surnames are too impersonal. Too military. He doesn't want to refer to the family but to the individual.

He still calls House 'House' because anything else just doesn't fit, and God forbid anyone call him anything but Chase, but Forman is Eric, now, just as Taub is Chris.

Thirteen has always been Remy…

"What is it, then?" Foreman, Eric, asks.

It's hard for Chase to explain the feeling he got when he stood in the ICU, the feeling of dread, the pounding in his chest, the anxious sensation of 'being caught' and of 'being guilty'.

"I just felt wrong in there. I felt scared, and I know that's pathetic before you laugh."

Foreman isn't laughing.

Chase looks stressed. Agitated.

"I felt like I was going to have a panic attack."

The words stop Foreman's heart momentarily. Then he feels it pounding hard because he's heard them before. He's heard those words from Chase's mouth and it wasn't a good situation that incited them.

Flashes come before his eyes of a handwritten document burning up in his own hands, of Chase's guilt being singed by a single, growing flame.

He doesn't want Chase to remember any of that so he backtracks furiously. He makes this about something else entirely.

"The last time you were there you weren't in good shape," Foreman reminds him, though there's something in his tone that's changed. Chase doesn't notice it. Foreman hears it, loud and clear, and fights to rectify it.

He clears his throat.

It doesn't clear his mind.

"You were seriously hurt, Chase. You could've died. Then you got sick and that wasn't exactly smooth sailing either. The last time you were there you were drugged out of your mind and had lines coming out of every opening available. Tied down. Intubated. Sure, most people don't remember the experience in its entirety of it but still."

Still, they remember some. They panic.

Not all of them remember killing a guy in that very area, however, and at this moment in time, neither does Chase.

"You panicked because it was a horrible situation to be in, Chase. I know from experience it took me a long, long time to ever feel comfortable with patients in isolation because all I could remember was being locked behind that glass myself. All I could remember was the pain."

Chase sighs.

It makes sense but his mind is still torn.

"I don't know what I want," he says, as he gives up, as he drops the fork and no longer tries to put on a front. He looks sad. Frustrated. Confused.

He hasn't felt this 'lost' since he gave up the seminary.

"Only you can figure that out," Foreman tells him.

It might be stating the obvious but Chase appreciates the fact that he's stopped trying to convince him.

Chase stares into that half-empty glass of orange bits and ice as if searching for the answer.

He learned that from his mother. It doesn't come, though. Not yet. The answer doesn't grace him with its elusive presence.

"I don't know what I want," he repeats quietly, because its true.


	26. Chapter 40

_Once again, apologies for invading the inbox of those that have this on story alert. _

_I'd say this chapter was pure fluff, to be honest. _

**Part 40**

His therapist addresses the issue of responsibility and Chase's lack thereof. Start off small, he says, a grain of sand on a wide, vast beach. Take it back gradually, as and when ready, and don't be afraid of being culpable, as I know you always have been.

"Don't be afraid of making mistakes," he tells his patient. "Whilst you're under our care we'll always be there to reel you in."

The same man tells House that he should reel him out gently, release the restraints bit by bit to save from the development of control issues.

"It will be the hardest thing in the world to watch him fall but he needs that learning curve."

It's difficult to let go. It's hard to unravel the ties that keep the man safe. Any 'father' would tell you that and House resents this man, this therapist, this _doctor_ for even suggesting it.

"Just give him space," he's told. "Give him time. Give him boundaries, by all means, but don't keep him locked away. The truth might hurt him, sometimes, but he has to learn to feel pain, too."

House stops still at those words. His eyes, so blue, so vivid, so determined, practically stifle this man.

They cut him down to size.

"Those are rich words, coming from a man that practically ordered him locked away only a few days ago because you felt he couldn't handle the truth."

"That was different."

"Was it?"

If House had his way, these 'head doctors' with their pawing fingers and their eyes that bore into a person's very psyche wouldn't have their way with Chase, wouldn't plant ideas into his head that will grow, grow up to overwhelm him.

"I'll give him space," he says, and his voice indicates that's a promise, "but, if you think I'm going to sit back and watch him fall back down the abyss that I dragged him out of you're more deluded than your patients are."

"You can't smother him forever, Doctor House."

"Who's smothering?"

House is a 'therapist' in his own right and his methods might not be entirely 'by the book' but he's got the boy smiling, from time to time.

It's more than any of these 'experts' have managed, thusfar.

(*)

Chase attempts to make dinner as a way of saying thank you, as a way of earning his keep and as a poignant method of trying to justify his place, here.

He's so desperate to prove he can be useful; that he won't be a load being carried.

"I don't claim to be a chef but I microwave a pretty convenient pizza. Nobody can key in times like I can."

He was simpler, as a kid. As the years went by he became more complex. Cameron used to love what his surgeon's hands could do with some base ingredients and a bit of time. Such elegant hands, he has, all the better for touching, moulding, creating. He would carve a turkey so carefully, so precisely it was as if it was as delicate as a patient, would slice an onion without even a hint of a tear.

"What would I do without you to do the dirty jobs while I can sit and enjoy the end product?"

She called him an 'expert' and told him it was why she married him, which was certainly closer to the truth than the idea she married him for love.

Chase always lived to experiment with flavours and one could never accuse him of being 'vanilla'. Back in his student days he lived off tinned spaghetti on toast only his added 'twist' and 'flavour' was a dashing of Cajun powder to give it a kick.

Anne loved the 'spice' and so did he. Many a night was made and sealed following one of Chase's modified 'dishes'.

Tonight he attempts something _less_ spicy. House made a deal with him that he would trust him in the kitchen if he promised to at least try to eat something. Bribery is such a low measure but he didn't want to follow through with the threats of temporary hospitalisation and forced feeding.

He can't help but feel Chase believes he has 'got away with it.'

"I mean it," House had warned. "If you don't start taking care of yourself I'll be forced into drastic measures that only look good on screen if you're playing one of the Suffragettes."

Though his one arm doesn't work as well as it should it doesn't disable him entirely. His efforts are admirable. He opts for his young self's signature dish of microwave pasta and bolognaise sauce. As a 'magical ingredient' he grates cheddar cheese on the top. It's hardly going to blow House's culinary mind but the thought is there.

"Its supposed to be neat," he says, that obsession taking over, once more. "It looks better like that. If it tastes shite then at least I can say it looked good."

It's sweet, in a way, watching how he tries to perfect the presentation, how he tries to arrange it to look impressive because that's always been important to him. He always strived so hard for perfection, always pushed himself to get it, even in something as simple as this.

It's almost amusing how a small job is turning into a quest, though, as commendable as it is.

"I'm sorry it's taking awhile," he says, embarrassed, "but my damn leg keeps getting in the way."

"You're preaching to the choir, altar boy."

"The arm doesn't help."

He isn't being competitive but there is a coy smile on his face.

"The brain issues are hardly a doddle either. I get mixed up with words, times, numbers and my hand eye isn't exactly perfect."

"_Okay._ You win. You're more of a gimp than I am."

"Just saying…"

"So am I."

He has given it all his time but has struggled immensely just to navigate around the compact space. His injuries are an added weight and he is well aware of them.

The truth is, his co-ordination hasn't been perfect since it happened but that's gradually improving. It's the awkward cast that's the main issue. House understands it's hard to stand for long with one leg out of commission. He knows how frustrating it is to try to carry out normal tasks when your body is lagging behind.

Chase will be walking on both feet by the end of next week, though. House never truly will.

It's not envy that crosses House's mind but it is something similar.

A pang. A throb.

Chase will be a beautiful butterfly emerging from something damaged and broken yet this is all House will ever be. Still, he has a hand in this patchwork Chase, sits down at a neatly made table and he feels...warm. Proud.

"Its not much," Chase says, as he slips into the chair that mirrors House's. "A real pauper's dinner but I like it, you know?"

It's not much but it's something.

Chase sits down and, for the first time in too long, he enjoys what's put in front of him, that taste, that simplicity. He doesn't eat nearly enough and it's still worrisome, how little appetite he has, but it's effort, at least.

It's not a lot but at the same time it's everything.

(*)

They sit in silence.

Side by side, they rest on the couch as MTV shows videos that House has seen before but which are new to Chase. One of the beautiful things about his memory affliction is that the whole world seems vast with new stimulation. Experiences which had become mundane and unimportant are fresh, now, and music which he'd grown tired of is still as enchanting and as moving as it was when he first came across it.

House envies that, envies being able to look at life and music through fresh, newborn eyes even if the words sound familiar.

"I live in a kind of constant state of Déjà vu," Chas comments, as pictures pass before his eyes as if he knows them but doesn't recognise them. "I might be able to imagine the bass line or…something. That might be just my imagination, though."

"I'll have to dig out my old repertoire of jokes, then, the ones that Wilson doesn't laugh at any more. You're disabled enough to find them funny."

Chase's face turns a little reluctant, his eyes a little reserved as he asks "Can we just watch a movie instead? What if I don't laugh? I wouldn't want to hurt your feelings."

Such fragile feelings they are.

(*)

They watch The Usual Suspects on cable. It's a good choice for stimulation of the brain, House thinks, because the plot has twists and the ending is unexpected and well pieced together. Chase has a problem with concentrating for long periods of time but House tries his best to keep him engaged with constant questions and requests for his opinion.

"Did you see that?"

"What kind of an ass would fall for that?"

"Would you ever be so arrogant as the cheese-face Baldwin without getting your cheese-face blown to smithereens?"

Chase has no idea that Kaiser Soze is that weak, simpering 'gimp' that House claims is based upon him ("aside from the simpering, of course – I'm more of a growler than a whiner!"). From start to finish, when he's paying attention, he swears blind, deaf and dumb that the 'real' Kaiser Soze is Gabriel Byrne's character, his explanation being that it's always the dark, moody persons that kill and never those that are meek and nice and helpful.

Chase is not dark. He's moody, though. He can be meek. He can be kind. He can be helpful.

He's also killed…

"Sometimes it's the ones you least expect," House says thoughtfully, as he peels another pistachio nut and drops the shells on the table. It bothers Chase, the mess, the untidiness. He's taken to stacking magazines so compactly in the rack it's as if he's looking to re-sell them and his constant need to gather crumbs up from the table is both obsessive and infuriating.

He doesn't glare at House but he does give him a look that suggests that he feels House to be unnecessarily slack.

"Were you always this neat?" House asks, pondering another side-effect, another altered personality trait.

"What do you think?" Chase retorts, mirroring House's constant, repetitive question to him, this past two and a half hours.

He tries to recall Chase's locker, having 'gone through' it on many occasions as part of his scheming. Was it neat? Was it tidy? He recalls it being surprisingly impersonal but for a black and white photograph hidden beneath stacks of books of a woman he deducted to be Chase's grandmother.

He remembers Chase's apartment, the way his ties were arranged by colour and each and every shoe was organised with military precision.

"Guess you were always OCD," House mumbles, as he places another label upon the boy. "Meek, kind, helpful and tidy, then. Why, Robert, you have all the trappings of a serial killer!"

(*)

He falls asleep before the end of "Iron Man" (a character which he insists is inspired by him in the same way that Kaiser Soze is based on House – "Me, with my iron plated head and my iron plated leg and my trusty invincibility") and, as House looks at Chase's eyes flickering from REM sleep, he wishes the boy truly were more iron than he is satin, more steel than cotton wool.

House wishes he, himself, were more sociopath, a la Kevin Spacey, because that way he might not care so much. That way, he might not feel justified in pulling down Chase's grandmother's blanket and covering him with it in the same way he used to cover Stacey when she fell asleep in the same place.

It's not big. It's not tough.

It's not House.

He wishes he didn't linger for a few moments longer than necessary to ensure the boy is dreaming well and in need of nothing, wishes he didn't leave his bedroom door ajar just in case some unseen night terror rages through that addled brain of his.

He wishes he didn't lie awake staring upward and listening out for the rhythmic breathing that tells him Chase is living. Thriving.

He doesn't wish for the feeling to go away, though, the feeling of fulfilment, of satisfaction, of purpose, perhaps even contentment.

He deserves those, he feels, for everything he's done.

For everything he's still to do.


	27. Chapter 41

_To those still around…hope the 'fluff' does not put you off. They're heading towards the crest of a wave, really. It's nice to 'dance in the ocean' but can they stay afloat? _

**Part 41**

Chase wakes up with an imposing thought in his head, a burning 'need' that stifles all else. It's vivid and strong. It wrestles him into submission. His heightened emotions (a symptom which can be both devastating and beautiful) play havoc with him.

He needs this. It's as if all life will cease to exist if he does not satisfy this craving.

He needs this - and he needs House to help him achieve it.

He looks like an excitable, demanding little boy but he's so reluctant with it, biting his lip, trying to hold back.

"Spit it out, _Robbie_. You look like a five year old that's about to wet his pants."

"I need, uh, I…"

"The bathroom? Don't tell me you forgot where it is because that means you're regressing and if you're regressing that means we're doing something wrong and yada yada yada…"

Chase smiles. His teeth are bright white, pearls behind full lips. His head falls to the side a little and he looks so _enchanting_ like this. He looks so bright where he can be so dark, so 'glee' where he can look so cracked and disturbed.

It's hard to know what mood he'll awaken in. There's no predictive quality to all of this. There's no pattern.

"You need what? I don't 'do' fill in the blanks, Chase. Not at 7am."

"I need sand, House."

Sand. Not money, not love, not freedom.

Just sand.

"There's a box of it in the crèche playground. You might want to tuck your legs up, though. It's made for little boys much littler than you."

Chase doesn't 'huff', exactly, but his shoulders sag a little and the tone of voice he uses might well constitute a good-natured whine.

"I need the ocean, House. I feel like I haven't seen it forever. I'm not a born city boy and the last time I remember being anywhere near the beach I think I was trying to drown myself."

"How very cinematic."

"I'm serious."

Chase sounds serious but might not be, sounds sincere but could be being dramatic. House looks at him to see if he can establish which it is but he sees nothing.

No willingness to expand the thought.

No need to indulge the memory.

Still, he can't wipe the image of Chase walking waywardly into blue, enveloping waters out of his head, can't help but think that if Chase ever had been suicidal it might well have been this he had attempted - giving himself back to the Land and Sea, so to speak. Dramatic. Indulgent, in ways that Chase never was but possibly could have been.

"I just want the sea. I was born to it."

He was born to the sea. He emerged from his mother's waters straight into Australia's and he often felt that was home to him. A benefit of his father's well paid job was that the sound of the soothing waves was never far away. He often sought solace in the comforting arms of the sand dunes when things got the better of him. Many a night he spent sleeping under the stars when the yelling got too much, when the indifference became too cold and to sharp.

Nobody ever came to coax him home…

The ocean grants Chase clarity where life cannot and the smog and the dust of the city so often leaves him feeling out of sync.

He sighs as he sinks down into the couch. House drinks his coffee black before he even dresses. The smell is strong but House's scrutiny is stronger.

"You want the ocean. In Princeton."

"No, I want the ocean in Melbourne but I'll take it anywhere I can get it."

"Melbourne's a no-go. Jersey shore's about as far as you'll get. I imagine it's not quite the same."

"I don't care. I'm not fussy."

"No, but you are fuzzy."

He is not permitted to fly until passed fit by the neurosurgeons. Pressurised cabins and high altitudes can have outstanding and overwhelming effects on those who have been 'through the ringer' and, with his susceptibility to migraines that leave him unable to function, a flight would be unadvisable.

His injuries leave him prone to DVT, a leg that's wasted and ruined and an arm that's at less than 50% functionality. He's effectively grounded, unable to migrate to the place he once called home but that doesn't mean he can't get his wish.

"I just want to walk along the shore. They say it's good for muscle building and balance, anyway. We could call it rehab. I know you're all for that."

Rehab for body and mind.

"I was thinking foam mats and leg crunches than beach bars and speedos, Chase, but yeah, lets turn this into a medical expedition."

"Why not?"

House tries to imagine Chase on the beach, a stuttering, unsteady young man with a face fit for the surf but a leg fit for nothing. He imagines a kid trying to claw back some of what he was through insufficient substitution.

He looks so desperate for this, as if it's prodding in his head, as if it's a tapping force that won't leave him alone until he satisfies this desire.

"Look, I'd try really, really hard. I'd earn it. I'd do whatever you want. I'd eat whatever you made me eat. I'd let you weigh me twice a day, if you had to. I'd let you banish me to my room with a blanket and an IV when I need it and I'd stop complaining every time you want to test me."

"I like you complaining. It makes me feel fulfilled."

"Okay, then I'd complain _more_. Anything you wanted. This is just what I want."

"What you want?"

He doesn't ask for a lot, that much is a certainty. He's high maintenance, medically, but he doesn't demand.

House dragged Chase out from a cavern of darkness. Is it not fair that he gets to see the beauty of the world? Is it not right, then, that he gets to experience the comforting presence of his own youth, as bleak as it was for the most part?

"Come on. The weather's getting warmer. The skies are always so blue in the morning. Doesn't it make you want to paddle, House? Doesn't it make you want to feel the sand on your toes?"

"I was always more interested in gravel than sand, Chase, and I never did learn how to swim. Salt water does bad things to my skin. I don't float well."

"I could teach you…"

His eyebrow is upturned, his mouth attempting to suppress what House has come to know as an 'uber-Chase smile'. House has noted a common ground in his behaviour, a need to turn things around to make them beneficial for others. He figures he used this tactic a lot as a child – that he would seek out points of interest so that it didn't quite look like his parents were doing something to please him.

Such a sad little trait, to have to 'con' your parents into loving you, but House understands the tactic well.

"I could teach you to surf," Chase continues, as if this promise will suddenly turn on the green light for him.

Don't do it for me, he's saying. Let me do it for you.

_Why don't we drive Mum to the beach today, Dad? She's been really depressed. I know how she bugs you when she's depressed..._

Those manuals say that on a flight, should the air become turbulent and the plane tread dangerous territory, the parent should always place their own mask on first.

Chase's parents took that advice too literally.

They always came first.

House frowns. His eyebrows meet in the middle and it exaggerates the signs of ageing that make Chase's idea so unfathomably ridiculous. He looks like a middle-aged man being hounded to death by a boy that should know better.

The boy continues. The hounding will no doubt be incessant as Chase's social cue skills remain as imperfect as ever, especially when he is of heightened emotion. He simply doesn't know how to stop. It's a lesson he will need to learn if he's to survive in the real world because others will snap and break as he invades their mental space.

He doesn't do it often.

"I could teach you everything I know, House. I'm a good teacher."

"Right, because you know so much. Because your balance is second to none at the minute. Because my leg's just made for the boards."

"There was a kid at school who'd had his leg amputated at six. He missed a full year with meningitis and came back with a stump where his shin used to be. He grew the hair, the stubble, bought the board. I've never seen anyone ride a wave like Finn did. It was like he was born for it."

"Heart warming, but not entirely relevant. I'm no spring chicken. I don't like water. I'm not averse to getting my feet dirty but you'll never catch me in a wetsuit."

He runs a hand absently over his leg. Chase notices but says nothing because that's House's curse, his obvious-private curse that everybody asks about but nobody truly knows what it means. Chase has learned things about House, too, has learned that, given the correct motivation, he will always give in and that his silence often means he's swaying towards agreeable.

He's watching for a sign, for a tell, a hand on an earlobe, perhaps, or a finger rubbing imaginary 'sleep' from his eye.

He mouths the word 'please' with a charming smile, with eyes so impossibly blue and wide for a grown man.

He seems so…light.

"I'll write a list," House says, finally. "Regulations. Orders. You fulfil every single one of them and Daddy might treat you to a trip to the seaside. You fail to live up to even the tiniest thing and it's no go."

He has to be careful with the boy, treat him like shattered glass, in a way, because he's volatile as well as charming, a ribbon with a spark edge. Handle him too roughly and those delicate splinters will get beneath his skin and bleed - but, he also needs forceful motivation.

This will be reward. Recognition.

"What do you want me to do?"

"If I tell you to push an extra yard you will do it. If I tell you to sit at that table until every last garden pea is inside of you, you will do it. You will give every effort to tick the box. You will not slack off and you will not complain."

"Thought you liked me complaining?"

There is the uber Chase smile, this time unhidden. House chooses to ignore it.

Is this any different to a parent telling a child "Tidy your room or you're grounded." "Finish your breakfast and then we'll talk about going to the park."

It's positive reinforcement.

"You will indulge me every cable show I choose to make you sit through. You will humour me when I include questions about said shows in your neuro checks. You will not demand that I 'cheat' because you don't feel like dealing with me. You will allow me to examine you any time I see fit without insisting you are fine. If I think you need to lie down you will not pout and you will not demand to treat yourself."

The expression is indescribable.

Chase's eyes scream 'unfair' but he holds it back well.

House lowers his voice as he says "Cameron might have fallen for the baby blues but I won't."

If you fulfil these tasks then, he says, you will get to paddle your feet, to graze along the sand, to build castles with moats, if that's what you want.

Chase attempted 'cute' and 'cheeky' from time to time but he never pulled it off this well, never with this lack of inhibition, never with this boyish sense of expression.

"What would I have to do to get you into the water? Let you cut my head open to have a look inside?"

House replies quickly. Deadpan.

"You'd need to die and come back as Erika Eleniak. Either that or try and drown yourself again. I already walked through rubble and flame for you. I might as well tread water for your worthless little ass."

Fire. Rubble. Water.

House would put his mask on last, it seems.

Who cares what those manuals say?


	28. Chapter 42

**Part 42**

The 'obedience' lasts but a day.

He sits with wide, owlish eyes, looking to escape his neuro-psych meeting because he feels fearful and depressed, convinced they're going to 'find' something in his scans that dictates need for further investigation. He doesn't want to risk being admitted indefinitely. He doesn't want to be bedridden and forced to lie with wires on his head and hourly tests that poke and annoy.

He doesn't think it's necessary.

Panicked and afraid he sits reluctantly in the waiting room, refusing to move when his name is called.

"Robert Chase," the assistant calls out from behind a door of frosted glass. People don't know what's down there. You can't see beyond until you get there.

Chase doesn't like what's down there.

"Mr Chase?"

It's his cue to move but he finds himself rooted to the spot. He can't move, doesn't want to. His legs are deadweight and his mind holds him hostage.

It tells him to stay very, very still.

She doesn't see him. His hands fiddle frantically with the magazine in his lap as he eyes the door and contemplates making a limping dash because he doesn't want the talking and he doesn't want the head scan; doesn't want his body encased in that metal tube whilst he fights hard to control his own breathing.

He doesn't want to hear that hammer noise above his head like last week, doesn't want to be called into the side room and told "We've seen something abnormal."

He doesn't want to talk about it.

His head has been troubling him, tightness in the temples, pins and needles in his scalp around the gradually healing surgical wound. He can handle the pain, light and persistent, grating, rather than burning. His concentration has been waning, though, and he knows it'll be noted.

He can't risk that. Not again. It's stupid but he just can't face it.

The woman calls his name again, this time more loudly. Her eyes scan the room but he hides well out of sight, away from her scouring eyes.

She turns away, closes the door behind her as if she's given up on him for the time being and he feels relief beyond that which is reasonable.

He counts to five in his head, though forwards only. It's an exercise he hates, counting backwards, counting sideways, counting in twos, in threes and in sevens. They tell him his brain will adjust itself to its new structure when its ready but it still frustrates him that simple math evades him.

It's irrelevant in this moment as he stands up slowly; as he moves out of those unit doors without any sound whatsoever.

He feels he can breathe, now that he's succeeded.

He feels…oddly exhilarated, to have got away.

He doesn't know why he goes to Wilson, doesn't know why he finds himself dragging his weakened leg to House's right hand man's office but he feels it's the safest place for him. Wilson is a man he can trust. Funny. Sarcastic. Painfully honest.

Wilson is what House refers to as a 'boomerang' – a friend that will come back no matter how hard and how far you try to throw them away, a good guy whose middle name is 'doormat' and whose puppy-dog eyes might melt a woman's heart but will never intrigue her.

"Poor Wilson", House often says, "drawing the short straw with the two of us."

He doesn't even knock. Wilson is always free on a Wednesday afternoon because that's the day he dictates to patient files and reviews. He'll sit at his desk with a boxed salad and a cup of herbal tea and he'll scrawl down every last recommendation he can think of.

When Chase practically falls through his door he's surprised to see him, not least because he's scheduled for testing at this very moment. Wilson had noticed his name on the list when he'd been searching for a particular patient's timed allocation, felt that familiar pang of regret when he saw the name 'R. Chase' on a patient document, rather than signed as the doctor.

"What are you doing here?" he asks, as Chase eyes the door as if it may well open up and devour him.

He looks persecuted.

"Please don't tell House," he says, ignoring the question, though he leans across the desk grabbing Wilson's arm in plaintive despair.

He was just scared of what they might find.

He doesn't want his fear to be a black mark against him.

"You won't tell him, will you?" he asks, as his eyes turn bright and his body language turns young and dejected. "If he finds out I skipped my appointment it'll ruin everything."

Wilson looks torn as he looks at House's 'adopted child'; as he sees the pleading eyes of a wretched boy.

"Why did you skip it, Chase? It's important."

The question is met with silence, as Chase stares down at the arm he still grasps, as he tries his hardest not to look Wilson in the eye.

"Did something happen?"

"I just didn't feel like going," he says, quietly, finally. "That's all."

He has his secrets.

Everybody lies.

(*)

He thinks he's got away with it…

House is an analyst by nature, always has been. He's always had that innate ability to look through a person and see on the inside. Stacey used to call him inobservant – careless, even, but the opposite is true.

House sees. He sees everything, every last speck of change in a man or woman; every little nuance and flicker of difference.

He just chooses not to care.

"You think I'm stupid," he says, and the comment comes out of nowhere. They're sat in House's office. Chase is in House's chair, his fingers digging deep into 'their' red and white ball.

He's 'playing boss'. Foreman has already asked why House suddenly lost a good few years and developed a more interesting accent. Chase smiled at him, sent him away to "do an LP or something" and to "confirm it's not Lupus."

He's been waiting here for House since he left Wilson's office on the understanding that they'd keep it a secret so long as it didn't happen again.

"_Tell him you fell asleep. That way, it wasn't your fault. But seriously, Chase, you can't just skip appointments like that. I know they're invasive and I know they're a pain in the ass but…you almost died."_

"_I know."_

"_Remember that, Chase. You had a cement slab fall on your head and you could've been killed by it."_

_A skip. A pause._

"_I know."_

"You didn't show up for your appointment. Why?"

"I fell asleep. I'm sorry."

"That's a lie."

"What? I'm not lying."

"You are. You might as well be telling me you were shacked up with a colleague in the janitor's closet."

That happened. That happened, but Chase blushes fiercely as if it were a shameful mistruth.

House notes the stiffening of his back, defensive, protective – feline, in a sense. If there were hairs there, they'd be standing on end to make him look taller. More of a threat.

He shifts a little.

"Why didn't you show, Chase?"

"I told you. I feel asleep. Why don't you believe me?"

"Because I know you."

Chase stops playing with the ball. That toy becomes motionless in his hands. His whole body becomes…still.

House pushes because he thinks he knows the reason why Chase didn't show. 'His' boy is an open book and he doesn't need an MRI or a CT to show up those thin, black letters on his ribbon.

It's all there. It's written in Indian Ink across his face.

"I've seen the way you flinch when the TV gets too loud."

"Sometimes, I'm sensitive to sound. It's normal when there's evidence of diffuse axonal injury as well as the localised injury I received. That's what the therapist said."

He tries to smile.

"You shouldn't have it on that loud, old man. It'll damage your ears."

He feels he's escaped the scrutiny with a smart-assed comment. House remembers how often he did that, back in the day, and it almost makes him smile back to see the old Chase there, peeping out from behind layers of damaged tissue.

"I've seen the way you rest your head on the back of the couch and assert pressure on the temples."

He does it again, makes it without crime. His fingers play at said temples curiously, innocently.

"I'm checking for hair growth. It doesn't feel stubbly, now. It feels soft. Taub reckons I've been bleaching it but it's always this blond when it first grows."

"Right. Super blond and baby fine. How proud you must be of it."

Chase smiles.

"I am."

It's notable that the smile doesn't reach his eyes. It's forced. It's bravado. It's cockiness to mask fear.

Just like any other young man that knows he's been caught, Chase has an answer for everything. They're not quickfire, though. His brain doesn't work that fast. It's as if he's learned them all on the off-chance they'd be needed.

It's as if he's known these questions were coming.

He picks at invisible lint on his sweater. There's nothing there but it gives him something to do with his hands. He stares at them as if they're not part of him.

Sometimes, he doesn't feel part of himself.

"Your pupils look dilated sometimes. It can be a response to pain and stress."

"Yeah, it's stressful when you can't remember a word you've used every day for your entire life because the fibres in your brain aren't attached properly."

"What about the aphasia? I've asked you questions and you've answered something completely different. "What time is it Chase?" "England won by four points to two."

Chase smiles as if its funny when he knows it's not.

It's a reflex response, prompted by nerves. He laughed when they told him his mother died. Then he just cried.

"You've done it three times in the past two days, Chase. I haven't said anything because I wanted to see if it progressed into something more. I sent your doctor an e-mail and he said he'd noticed the same thing."

That one gets him.

He looks flustered. His eyes search uselessly for escape but there's nowhere to run. House's questions have him paralysed, restrained as effectively as straps and ties and leather belts that he prays House won't use on him when he realises he's been hiding something like this from him.

He raises his voice just a little, not in anger but in discomfort because he dislikes scrutiny. He doesn't appreciate being forced into a corner.

Deep down, he knows it's his own fault and it only makes him push harder, dig deeper.

"It's not aphasia. Sometimes you just speak quietly. I mishear what you're saying. He's the same. He's got the added disadvantage of being Dutch. What do you expect? For about the first three weeks after I woke up I could still hear ringing in my ears. It's only just started easing off."

House slams his cane down onto the ground and watches in necessary satisfaction as Chase's body jumps; instinctively cowers as his eyes crease up and his face expresses unbridled pain.

"That hurt?"

"YES!"

Good, House thinks. It was supposed to.

A little pain to bring you to focus.

A little 'reality' to bite you on the ass.

"You've been experiencing pain, haven't you? Pressure in the temples."

Chase is flustered. He's confused.

Chase has cotton wool in his head, again, and he doesn't know where he is…

"Answer me."

He nods. He doesn't speak because he feels ashamed. He also doesn't trust his voice.

"How bad?"

"N-not bad. Just…there."

"You don't have to hide things for me, Chase. You don't have to put yourself at risk because of a stupid walk on the beach. You think I haven't noticed you masking it again this past few days?"

"I knew you wouldn't let me go if you knew I was having difficulties."

"But, you thought I'd let you go if you missed an appointment in case something showed up? God, Chase…"

"I just – I just wanted to forget about it. I figured I'd talk to you about it when we got back."

"What if it had been too late by then?"

"I don't _know_. I don't. I'm sorry, alright? I was stupid, but it was nothing."

House knows exactly what it was. He might not value the input of Chase's 'head doctors' but he will collaborate with them if it's beneficial to their mutual 'friend'.

He knows exactly what is the cause of Chase's pressure, his confusion – the extra-brightness in his eyes and the pallor of his skin.

"Have you been sleeping?"

Not easily. His eyes shift. There's that tell again.

"Sometimes…"

"For how long?"

"I dunno. Seven, eight hours a night…"

It's brutal dishonesty. He had cited a desire to stop the Ambien a couple of weeks back claiming it left him weak and unable to concentrate. He swore blind he was better at switching off, now, that he was having no problems in getting to sleep. He just didn't want it any more, didn't want the feeling of being unable to stay awake, of being forced off to sleep.

Chase lies. It's so obvious.

"I've been fine. Really, I have."

Everybody lies – but, House sees through them all.

The truth is he's been struggling to switch off. The exhaustion, it builds up all week until he crashes like he did the other night on the couch where he was flat out, splayed out and dead to the world.

It's been affecting his concentration and it's been noted.

It's been building the pressure in his brain causing further aggravation to the scar tissue. Too little sleep can have devastating affects on someone whose brain is already devastated.

"Now, tell me the truth."

"I _am_."

Chase should know better but somehow, he doesn't. Now, he just looks sheepish. Defeated. He looks like it's all over and it's heartbreaking. He's taken the lie so far, now, and he can't turn back.

"Your doctor's prescribed a higher dose of Ambien. He wants you having at least ten hours of sleep per night, nothing less than that. He doesn't want you waking up in the night. Baby needs to sleep right through."

"But it won't be a natural sleep. You know I hate how it makes me feel."

Whiny. Young.

Weakening, though…

"Your brain needs to recover, Chase. Plastic sleep is better than no sleep at all. I'd say you were functioning at around three hours at best."

"I'm fine."

Still protesting. Still hiding. Still masking the pain.

"It's written in your notes, now, Chase. It's all agreed in your treatment plan. I'll make sure you follow his orders even if I have to hold you down and force feed you the damn pills myself."

"You said he was a quack."

"I don't care what I said. You said you'd do whatever I said I felt necessary if you wanted your reward."

"You never said anything about _drugging_ me."

This is a Mexican standoff.

This is an impasse, and it will be Chase that cracks.

"You need sleep, Chase, and if I need to lie in bed next to you just to make sure you get it, don't think I won't do that."

Later on, House feels he is taking Chase's liberty when he forces him to swallow. It's painful to watch him choke those pills down with a look of pure hatred on his face. He does it to 'please' House but he looks upon it with such a deep, wracking hatred.

In this moment House feels horrible. He feels guilt and remorse tightening in his chest as if they were physical things.

He only wants what's best for him. Isn't that a sacrifice guardians have to make?

He tries to soften the blow. He tries to ease the punishment with a promise. He doesn't realise his words are designed to stop Chase from thinking of him as a monster.

"You sleep well and you'll be paddling come midday tomorrow. We'll get you a swimming cap to protect your head. Wouldn't want that scar getting sunburned."

Chase says nothing.

He doesn't even smile.

For ten minutes, he says nothing until he can no longer keep his eyes open, until the drugs begin to take away his consciousness in long, sweeping waves.

He struggles. He fights against the feeling of being carried away but there is no fight left in him.

He begins to see double. Triple. Then, he loses focus altogether.

He looks at this swimming, whirling image of House as if to say "_you_ did this to me."

(*)

It's like an endurance trial, a vow of silence to go along with his seminary school Vow of Celibacy.

He doesn't speak to House. Not one word. He doesn't open his mouth, doesn't let a sound escape from him.

He doesn't give House the benefit of his words, the glory of his voice – doesn't give him the satisfaction of a normal morning.

Even in the car there is silence. Chase presses his forehead against the window as he watches the world go by. He tries to count lampposts, street signs. He tries to count blue cars but finds himself incapable.

Once. Twice, he taps his forehead against that glass as if trying to knock some sense into himself.

All the while, House talks. He talks about the weather. He talks about baseball. He talks about roadkill as he passes a dead racoon and contemplates Heaven for Animals aloud.

"You think they have their own God? What would God for a racoon look like? Would he wear clothes like cartoon racoon or would he walk around in the buff?"

The quietness deafens. Each and every bump and grind of the engine is intensified, every last hiss and cry of the vehicles of others echoing all around them.

"I thought you might have an opinion on animal Gods, Chase. Don't you British people worship domestic hamsters?"

No answer. Nothing but harsh, abrupt, abrasive silence.

House watches Chase, watches how his face remains impassive and his eyes remain dead. He wonders momentarily if the Ambien's still sluggishly chugging around him keeping him sedated and rendering him soulless. He never advocated their use on him but he understands the necessity. He hates drugging patients unnecessarily but there's need, for Chase. There's need to take over his functions when he is incapable. For awhile, though, he wonders if this was such a good idea after all, for Chase's eyes show nothing of that youthful excitement they'd shown when he'd popped out the idea of a glint in the ocean.

They just drive, then. For such a long time there is simply nothing at all, no reaction, no response. Chase is virtually unconscious. If analysing GCS House would put him at around an eight, perhaps even less. Practically comatose. He hasn't tested his responses to pain but everything else is lingering around zero.

Then, he sees it.

His make-do Heaven.

His stand-in Utopia.

"Ah, here we go."

Up ahead, he sees it in the distance, a horizon of blue water dancing up from between buildings. He sees it as a glimpse. A snippet. A fragment.

He sees it as a promise so far away yet gaining on him, gaining on him…

House sees the increase in movement, the awakening, of sorts, and he chooses to interface with it.

"There it is, straight ahead. You'll never taste a better hot dog than on this here stretch of sand."

Chase doesn't care about hotdogs. He just wants to see the water.

House doesn't turn to look at him, frightened of breaking the spell, but he watches him through the mirror; watches as the blankness of his face gives way to curiosity, as the straight line of his lips succumbs to the 'parting of the waves', so to speak, as his mouth opens just a little and, just like the sun peeps out through the clouds, a tiny ray of Chase peeps out through his self-imposed waxwork statue disposition.

He knows, in this moment. Chase knows what House is.

He looks at him, finally, strained eyes suddenly open where they'd been so closed before.

"You thought I was taking you somewhere else, didn't you? You thought I was dragging you off to some rehabilitation centre to dump you off on someone else."

Chase still doesn't say anything but it's as if House has looked through his transparent skull and saw right into his head.

"You think I want anyone else trading in on my good work? You think I want anyone else touching my puzzles? You're going to be my masterpiece, Chase. Nobody else's."

Chase knows, now, that House is man who will go against his wishes if he feels its best for him but who will never, never go back on a promise.

He's never had anyone like that in his life before.

Nobody even close.


	29. Chapter 43

This is just another small part written due to a bad case of insomnia.

It's kind of flashbacky and possibly crap but it's what came from my head, tonight.

Welcome to the two 'newbies' who have been welcomed to this humble little world and, though novel-length, I hope you don't get bored and leave too soon.

Many thanks for your PMs and reviews. I'm suffering a lot with confidence, as I have said, and it really does make me feel better.

_**Part 43**_

**(*)**

"_I'm getting married."_

_There was no joy in the announcement. It was as if Rowan were telling him something as trivial as his plans for the evening. His chest had tightened, his fists curling inward. _

_He didn't know his father had been dating. _

"_When?"  
_

"_On Monday. We're flying on Thursday night. I was hoping you could tell your mother."_

_Just another burden to add to him. He hadn't even been invited the wedding, hadn't been called to witness the joining together of his father in Holy Matrimony to a woman he'd never met. _

"_Who is she?" _

_It had been a fair question. He deserved to know the name of the woman who was taking his mother's place. _

"_How long have you been with her?"_

"_It's not important."_

_He'd always had the sneaking suspicion his father had 'done the dirty' on his mother. There had been nights he'd found her sobbing as she tried in vain to put her lipstick on straight, as she'd ran a comb through her ruddy hair and asked her son "Do you think I'm beautiful? Was I not beautiful enough?"_

_Her pain was that of a scorned woman. _

_Her desperation for love and affection came in spurts between her utterances of hatred, of disillusionment. _

_Of blinding accusations against her son; against his father. _

"_Tell me how long, Dad."_

"_It's none of your business."_

_Rowan hadn't believed his son deserved to know how deep his betrayal went. Chase got the feeling his father was ashamed, though you never would've been able to tell by the look on his face. He was always an expressionless man, iron and stone and all things immovable. _

"_You don't even care, do you?"_

_Rowan had remained stoic as he told him "this isn't the time or the place."_

_The bitterness had been unfathomable. Uncontrollable. His eyes had filled with tears of anger as he'd told the groom-to-be "you disgust me."_

_His father had said nothing. _

_That evening he'd found his way to the beach. As the crowds had dispersed and the sun had lowered in the sky the area had become quiet. Peaceful. He'd sat on the sand staring absently at crumbling sandcastles, the labours of love between a parent and child, and he had wet the dry sand with his own tears._

_He couldn't remember the last time he'd built a sandcastle; the last time he dug down deep enough, hoping to find water. _

_He couldn't remember the last time he'd been a young man, running along the shore without a care in the world, and even then he felt he was doing wrong by leaving his mother to drink herself unconscious whilst he indulged his 'moment'. _

_He was just tired of it all. _

_He was just…tired. _

_The ocean had looked so inviting; so warm, and he was so cold. The waves seemed to be calling to him. As he'd looked up at that reddened horizon he'd imagined that death might well have been less painful than life; that his grandmother would be waiting for him on the other side with her arms wide open, her voice thick with utterances of love in a language he found so beautiful. _

_He wondered if his dad's face would crack when the police called at his door to tell him that his only son had washed up on the shore, bedraggled and unloved and dead to the world. He wondered if his mother would fall to her knees and sob at the unfairness of it all; of the waste of life that was her son and of the guilt she felt for making it so. _

_It was only when the last of the hangers on had left that Chase had been brave enough to get his feet wet. He'd left his shoes and socks in a neat row on the last of the dry sand, had folded his t-shirt with such aching precision that any mother other than his own would've been proud to call the particular boy her son. _

_He'd removed his jeans and folded them too, one last gesture before it was time to go. _

_He felt…ready, knowing that nobody on this Earth would miss him and that his death would be a great big "fuck you" to the man that ruined his life. _

_He would place his life into the hands of God and see if the Lord chose to take him… _

_It was his final glance at the world that brought it all home to him. He'd turned around and he'd looked at the place from where he came, at the vast expanse of sand, at the palm trees that swayed so gently in this cooling breeze. He heard the sound of two parakeets in the distance before seeing them fly overhead, red feathers peppered with green, a colourful display as the sky began to bleed a deeper red. _

_The sun disappeared beneath the ocean waves and he found himself lost without it. _

_As he felt the water gently licking at his shins he realised he didn't want it to be the last time he saw that glorious sun as she set right above him, didn't want those two parakeets to be the last flying birds he witnessed. _

_He didn't want that sandcastle to be the last he saw crumble, didn't want this past day to be the last he ever lived. _

_He sat down in the water, lay back, until he was almost submerged. _

_He looked up at that beautiful sky and the salt water in his eyes wasn't tears, any more. _

"_Fuck you, Rowan Chase," he whispered aloud, and the wind carried his words up into the sky as the tender arms of the ocean held him close and tight. _

_He felt loved, in that moment. _

_He felt held, as the sand moulded to his body, as the water stroked him like fingers might. _

"You've already given me more than he ever did," Chase explains, as he sits with his knees pulled up to his chest, with his feet submerged in water the way his body was. "He'd have just left me under the ground, that night."

It's sad but most likely true. His father never would've fought for him.

He never would've fought his case.

His father would've left him in that hospital bed with a goodbye, a good luck and a wish you all the best for the future.

He's never felt this warmth before. He's never felt this feeling of wanting to please and knowing that love will not be lost if he defies.

He's never felt this burning desire to obey and rebel because, either way, House will still be there and this 'bond' they have will not be broken.

There is so much more to him than House ever imagined. He sees that now, sees that as he skims a pebble across the surface of the water with such precision and such beauty that it bounces across every ripple of a wave.

House looks at him.

He says nothing, no smart remark, no dazzling comeback. He makes no joke and he offers no punch line.

He just turns his attention to the beauty of the water and he sees two men looking back. One is greying at the temples and his face is lined and worn.

His eyes are blue and knowing and there's something in them that wasn't there before.

The other man is young and fragile, so fair, so bright, so breakable yet so strong. His face is tired and ashen yet there are no lines to mark his path through life.

His eyes are blue and knowing and there's something in them that wasn't there before.

House looks at the rippling reflection that these men cast across the surface and he doesn't recognise either of them.


	30. Chapter 44

_Thank you for all your kind words. For the three PMs and the one review that asked about slash, I can safely say that there shall never be that. I wanted this to go where it chose to go and it chose against. Feel free to stop reading if that is not acceptable :)_

**Part 44**

**

* * *

**

They sit in a bar part way between ocean and home and, under the careful, watchful eye of a medic, Chase nurses his 'first' beer.

The day seems symbolic, a day of firsts, a day of experiences and resolutions.

Chase doesn't feel old enough. He didn't feel old enough with Foreman either but in here he feels like a small boy again. He can feel sand in his shoes but that's a familiar and welcome discomfort. Without the crutches, he walks with a protective limp. His limb is heavy and weak and, though he's been given a cane not unlike House's he chooses to walk on his own two feet.

His leg will get better. He's very conscious of that.

Chase likes his beer sweet, with a dash of lime. House prefers to take it like a man. They're limited to one, House driving and Chase damaged, but it's the gesture more than anything else.

Two guys out for a beer. How normal is that?

They look like two peas in a pod.

It is like a dam bursting, though, a river breaking its banks, a landslide, an avalanche. For House its like finally being inside of a long locked room and being told to 'go wild'. Chase gives him everything without trickery. There is nothing between them, now.

This isn't the man he hired. He wonders if it's the man Cameron knew when the doors were closed and the lights were out.

He was always curious about the mother...

"How was Mrs Chase? You're so chock full of Daddy that Mommy takes a back seat, which is kind of ironic since she drank herself to death."

It's blunt. It's direct.

Chase takes House's words without sentiment. This is not time for mourning. This is just time to unload.

"Well, she never smacked me around. Once or twice she started seeing things. Hallucinations, I guess. She threw a lamp at me thinking I was an intruder and it was such a cliché. It hit me in the face. You can still see the scar. That sobered her up, having to explain why I was sparked out on the living room floor."

He points to a small indent where flawless skin used to be. Proof. Evidence.

"Mostly she'd just scream at me, tell me that I drove him away. I could never bring friends home, that's for sure. She would yell that I made things complicated."

House can relate. He can relate to making things complicated.

Chase just seems bemused by it.

"That's the thing with kids, Chase. Selfish little bastards that want all of the attention. How dare they mess up Mommy and Daddy's plans. Your folks wanted to travel the world, not change your diapers."

House messed up his own parents' plans. Pop was too angry to let it go. Ma was electively oblivious to Mr House and his draconian view of parenting.

He has always felt that his father's treatment of him was questionable at best but to be ignored, to be neglected, to be forced to endure indifference, that is an even worse thing for a child.

Chase takes another sip of his drink. He does it slowly because he doesn't want it to end. He often uses that approach. He savours every moment.

"They never wanted children, you know? It was my fault for being born. Rowan never wanted to be a father. Things changed when I came along. My mum wasn't perfect, for one thing. She lost her swimmer's body."

"How very dare you, Robert Chase? I've heard some things in my time but that's just unforgivable."

Chase smiles at House's attempts to lighten this load, to ease with this expulsion of mock horror.

The older man nods his head.

Then, he opens up.

"Daddy made me the rebel I am today. Everything I am is thanks to that great, great man and his amazing parenting skills. I learned every trick in the book just to piss him off."

He comes to work on a motorcycle despite a bum leg. He defies authority as if it means nothing to him.

You cannot hold him down.

Chase tells House it makes lot of sense, that they are the products of their parents' lack of creativity.

They are moulded by indifference and intolerance.

House wants to mould him, to take this unloved clay and turn it into something that believes in itself.

He feels as if listening isn't enough.

Chase just looks so accepting. It's as if he feels he deserved this. It's sad.

"She used to accuse me of hiding her bottles or pouring them down the sink when she'd drank everything."

"Do I need to lock up my Vicodin?"

"No, you just need to stop taking it."

"It's for my pain, Chase, just like your Hydrocodone is for yours."

It's a fair comment. Chase had been on the ground, blind and panting and pleading for help.

He feels it's different, though.

"You abuse it."

"I spent years abusing _you._ Should I throw you away too?"

That makes him laugh. When he laughs he sparkles.

"Maybe you should flush me down the toilet. It wouldn't be the first time. I went to prep school, you know? I was forever getting my head held under."

"My, how the privileged live."

* * *

"Do you regret breaking up with your wife?" Chase asks, because he can barely believe House would ever settle down at all.

The truth is, House's own injury changed him as much as Chase's injury did. He turns the question around, directs it back without giving an answer.

"Do you?"

Chase doesn't blink.

"I don't remember being married."

Chase doesn't blink - but House does.

"Sometimes, neither do I."

* * *

"Why seminary school?"

House pushes, wondering if Chase will give. The boy doesn't flinch. No area, it seems, is off bounds. He had been a wasteland of mines before but since he emerged from one it's all turned; it's different. Perhaps it's a symptom. Perhaps those sedatives have done this to him.

Or, perhaps it's just time.

"Was it too many altar boy comparisons? El niño de choro?

Chase shrugs.

"Rowan was a man of science. I wanted to be a man of God. Marriage was unholy and I felt averse to love. I guess I had some bad experiences."

"There are always prostitutes. You don't need love for those. Jesus himself would've approved. In a way it's doing as He did."

It seems to belittle what Chase did. It seems to casualise it, somehow.

He doesn't want to joke about it. He doesn't want to make trivial something that meant something to him.

"I just wanted answers. I wanted faith. Turns out the Holy Father isn't a talker, though."

"He is decidedly mute."

Chase found that out soon enough. House didn't even question it.

"We used to do a lot of charity work. Some of the guys did retreats in Africa but I stayed away. I ended up in a hospice. I saw tons of beautiful, dying kids and I wondered what kind of God could let them suffer like that."

He thinks for a moment. He reflects. He remembers bald haired girls in pink wigs and little boys with no energy to kick a ball.

It hurt him, a physical pain, draining and persistent.

"I had a four year old boy die in my arms during a showing of Dumbo on TV. I figured science was my best bet, at that point."

"Doin' it for the kids."

Yeah. Yeah, exactly that.

"I don't feel it now, though. I don't want science I want a life. I did years of medicine and remember precious little of it. I have a failed marriage and a head full of misfiring neurons. I feel like a kid and I'm out of my depth. Where's the fun? Where's the enjoyment?"

House could lie, could tell him his life will be fulfilled and complete if he claws his way back. He could liken it to finding religion after years in absentia but would he even believe it himself?

"You were good," is all he says. "Way too interested in your own hair and a constant pain in my ass but...good."

He leaves it at that. He'll save the name calling and the pressure for another day.

Chase no longer wants the focus, the attention. He turns it around. He tries to take back.

"So, what about you? Why medicine?"

"Because I wasn't pretty enough for Dynasty and Burger King couldn't pay for my glam rock wardrobe. Plus, I always had a hankering for candy stripers."

"Right. Great."

Chase takes that in knowing the window has now closed, the shutters are back up and the stretch of House's openness may well have had this expiry date.

He still has the feeling that he has been privileged. Lucky that he has been permitted inside where precious little are invited.

He looks at the man for a moment. He tries to see where the man begins and ends but sees nothing.

House drains his glass. He burps, but it's not unruly.

"Drink up, baby boy. It's way past your bedtime."

As a cue to leave it's a challenging one!

It's also a House one and Chase appreciates the sign that things can return to normal.

That nothing has to change, even if he allows himself to be vulnerable.


	31. Chapter 45

_Written on the bus. _

_Still lacking confidence but thanks to those that have tried to help. I guess now that I've resolve the slash/no slash issue a lot of people will not be with me any more but thanks to those that still are. _

_

* * *

_

**Part 45**

Sometimes he wonders what it would be like for everything inside him that is denied and unknown to be revealed, for every feeling he pushes back to be shown, every thought aired.

Then, he remembers why it isn't. Because human beings suck. Because humanity is overrated. Because his salvation depends upon standing alone.

He's not standing alone, now. Perhaps that's what is unnerving him so.

The case irks him, an uncorrelated mass of symptoms that don't look right on the whiteboard and have no basis within or beside each other. He looks at them sideways but they don't dance. He looks at them inside out and back to front and there's no rhythm to them.

He does the unthinkable and speaks to the patient, a wallowing, simpering mess of a man who refuses to answer questions and whose presence on this Earth is tentative yet seemingly worthless, even to him.

He doesn't want treatment, he says. He pities himself so fully when he says "Just let me die."

There is no interest held for a man that doesn't want to help himself.

"He's lying. It's boring."

"He's sick," Foreman argues. "Sick people lie. You told us that years ago."

"Me being right isn't a new thing, Foreman. That's a given."

"As is the fact that patients lie."

It's frustrating, listening to this man speak. Watching him try. It's frustrating to House having to play a part in this game today when his playing pieces are all missing and he's vastly outnumbered.

"We don't have Thirteen to coax it out of him by giving him the eyes. And, the breasts. We don't have Chase to sweet talk him with made up stories of tonsils and ice cream and how there's always something to live and fight for."

A poignant thought, following on from yesterday's conversation when Chase admitted to him that Callie was worth living for, she with her black fur and her doe eyes, she with her loyalty and the fact that no matter what, she would never leave him.

House will concede that it's humans that are the animals, not dogs, and that perhaps those of the canine persuasion are truly more worthy of this Earth than Man.

"So, without our Knight and our Queen, what do we have left? Who wants to be the pawn and out-chess this guy?"

The patient is holding something back. Everybody lies, House knows, but he's distracted and it doesn't help.

He frowns, as he says "How do we get him to play ball?"

"Why don't you hug it out of him? Isn't that how you're getting through to Chase?"

"No. I tie him to a chair and beat him into submission," House replies, pokerfaced. "He doesn't cry any more. All I have to do is raise my cane and he's an open book."

Taub tries so hard to be witty, to be House-ian in his presence.

Taub is a plastic surgeon by trade and he tries so hard to be something he's not that he might as well botox his own face, implant his own lips, lift his own brow so that he can look different as well.

He tries, indeed – but, he fails so miserably.

He complains that this is 'hopeless' – that House is so busy allowing his mind to wander that he's letting this case get the better of him _and_ them.

When he calls House 'Papa H' and refers to Chase, rather uncharacteristically, as 'little Robbie Retard, the poor little rich kid who is undoubtedly the cause of his boss' distraction' it's like a pent up World War bomb finally doing it's job.

Foreman says only one thing.

"Taub – "

A warning, nothing more, but the warning goes ignored as the bloody rag is held in front of the steaming bull.

House had been so lethargic today. Chase is being assessed and invaded, pulled around and pushed in order to 'prove' he is disabled enough to warrant financial support and it has been playing on his mind. He doesn't want Chase's money, not to 'keep' him, but the kid has debts up to his eyeballs that his pay packet used to cover and he doesn't even know what they're for.

Reckless in his feeling of invincibility, Chase didn't take out insurance for critical injury. He's out of work long term so he has to be able to sustain himself; to pay his way, in some manner of speaking.

The boy is proud, too proud to feel good about admitting he is weak, and today is all about it.

He doesn't need to be disrespected, not like this.

Not by a man like this.

House is so much bigger than Taub and he should know better but doesn't, not now, not when his wires are brushing together and the charge is electric. He is the spider that's wrapping it's legs around the fly and he hovers, hovers with such unadulterated rage that Taub braces himself, preparing for this hissing lion to finally take it's swipe.

"You gonna hit me, now?" he asks quietly, but House is all for the bark and his bite has always been less than forthcoming.

He's so tempted. He's so tempted, and it takes him back to school when he would always stand up to the cocky little shit that made fun of the kid with braces, with glasses, with a mother on welfare…

"If you're gonna do it, House – "

"Differential diagnosis," House shouts, interrupting, though his eyes are fierce and his temple is throbbing. "Seizures, hallucinations, renal failure, cardiac arrythmia. Low body temperature. Rash. Pustules. _**What is it**_?"

His eyes don't leave the small man's face. They burn, his retinas like flames, his expression wildfire and raging.

He doesn't move to let go.

"Easy, tiger," Taub says when the pounding in his chest subsides enough to allow him to speak. "We're all just on edge, here. We're short staffed and we're in over our heads. You call him tin-man. I didn't mean it."

_I can call him what I like,_ House thinks, _but God help anyone else that even tries._

The tension is wild. It's painful.

It's smoke in the air.

"You're not so damn smart yourself," House says, forehead to Taub's, nose pressed against a surgeon's nose that hardly advertises its trade.

He lets go, though his mental grip remains tight. Firm.

"Don't ever say anything like that again if you want to keep your job."

The fact that nobody ran to Taub's aid, that's fitting. That's telling.

There's a reason why House doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, doesn't care, doesn't love, doesn't bond, doesn't connect. There's a reason why he reveals nothing, why he hides, why he shies away, why he holds his feelings tight to his chest.

There's a reason why he doesn't gravitate towards others and this is the reason - because, he can't hold back, because he can't 'give' in moderation.

It's because with responsibility comes a great weight; a deep, burning need to protect that which you are responsible for.

It can be hard to contain, sometimes.

* * *

Chase feels his physical state couldn't paint a more obvious picture. His body is a map of abuse that needs no key to be read, a textbook that requires no translation because Layman's terms need not apply.

Why is this needed? Why must he spell it out?

He has a deeply scarred head where the surgeon's knife dug in, peeled back. Extensive brain damage clearly visible on scans and pictures. Minimal use of his arm. His leg? The same.

"With rehab, things will get better but he's looking at years, not weeks or months. Mentally, he's lost a decade."

Chase appreciates it's all formality and paperwork but it's all so very unnecessary. His notes and charts say all that needs to be said. His prognosis is written in black and white.

_"Patient will require substantial assistance long-term. Work position not tenable."_

It saddens him but he understands. It doesn't break him down. It just angers him that these people choose to pore over it.

They stare at him, ask him humiliating questions.

He tries hard to give them what they want so they will leave him alone.

"Do you need help dressing?

Slight embarrassment. A flush on the cheeks. "I get tied up with sleeves sometimes. I can't move my arm very well. It's difficult to lift it from the shoulder."

"Eating?

A sore subject at times. Still being threatened with enteral feeding. Still held up in that respect. "I can do it myself, if that's what you're asking. I'm capable of holding a spoon."

"What about walking?"

Spoken almost with pride. "Short distance, no real problem. I need help with longer distances. I have crutches. A cane. I can't stand up for a long time but it's getting better."

"Medication?"

A sheepish look. Young and embarrassed. "Without prompting I'm useless. I forget. My memory's not so great."

"Personal hygiene?"

Uptight. Insulted. He practically spits out his response. "I manage."

And, so it goes on, a veritable 'can' and 'cannot' list which leaves him feeling more helpless than ever because there are so many things he struggles with, so many things his injuries have left him incapable of.

He listens as his therapists speak of one step forward, two steps back, of the unpredictability of this kind of injury. They speak of emotional dependence and feelings of isolation in equal measure.

They speak of a young man whose maturity has suffered and whose feelings are often exaggerated. Intensified.

He shifts, wants to say "I'm right here", but he doesn't matter. Not right now.

It's all about him but he doesn't matter.

They speak of a young man who no longer has the skills that made work possible, that he has lost some of what makes independent living tenable. With time he could be independent but that time will be long, the process arduous.

"We feel he requires substantial help. He's not physically or mentally capable of work or independence. He's living with his medical proxy who, luckily enough, is a very capable doctor. Otherwise, he'd be in a long term rehabilitation centre."

God, he hates hearing all of this.

He closes his eyes to try to take himself elsewhere and is thankful when the assessor is told that he still tires easily, finds it difficult to cope with intense questioning.

It gives him an excuse to stop thinking.

The doctor outlines the head storms, triggered at times through stress, and it's just another box to check as if Chase is an example, not a person. It's not about winning it losing, here, because Chase could not possibly lose nor could he 'win' for that matter.

He just rests in the knowledge that it's another ordeal he has clawed through, another obligation he has fulfilled. It's sad, though. He understood the hospital could no longer hold his position; that he was too uncertain, that his rehabilitation would indeed require him to re-learn what he can no longer practice.

He's not even sure he wants to relearn.

It doesn't make it any easier, though.

"That should be enough," the assessor says, though Chase doesn't hear him. In his mental exhaustion, he drifted away, job done, nothing more to give.

It seems cruel to wake him and so he is left to sleep, a frown etched upon his face even in repose.

It's natural sleep, at least, even if it's not a pleasant one.

* * *

"I got into trouble because of you today."

"Because of me? Why?"

"I was struggling with a case."

"And, that was my fault?"

"No. I was struggling with a case so my head was already not in the best place, lets say. Taub called you a retard and I didn't find it funny. I thought it was ironic, to tell you the truth. There certainly isn't much going on in that adulterous little pea-head of his."

Chase laughs keenly. Jovially.

He leans over and steals a peanut from House's bowl and the other man is so pleased he's attempting *something* he doesn't even slap him away.

"I fell asleep in the middle of my evaluation, House. Maybe he wasn't wrong."

"Oh, he was clearly accurate in his assessment but it's only amusing when it comes from me. You're my retard, not his."

He throws a few peanuts in his own mouth and shrugs nonchalantly.

"He can have Foreman. Homeboy's at a loose end since Thirteen absconded."

"Guess us retards drove her away, yeah?"

House likes that. He likes that attitude. He likes the lack of self pity that Chase is expressing, even on a day like today.

He leans across and ruffles his head the way he used to, feeling the softness of growth beneath his palm.

Chase was always that way. Mockingly self-deprecating.

At least that hasn't changed.

At least that part of him was salvageable.

"So, what happened to the patient?" he asks, once the molestation of his battered skull is complete. He reaches up as if to adjust his hair, as if he momentarily forgot he had precious little of it but he's just touching his hand to where the sensation remains. "Is he okay?"

It was always about everyone else, with Chase.

"Well, there's no rush for diagnosis any more. The idiot died keeping his own secrets."

Chase pauses. Blanches, a little.

"I'm sorry."

"What for? It isn't your fault. You weren't even there. Besides, he hasn't won. He doesn't realise I'll find out inevitably. I don't rest, Chase. Remember that."

He looks a little sad, though, a little thoughtful. He's hiding behind his own jokes but Chase sees through that. He doesn't see much but he sees that.

"If you need to talk –" he says softly, and it's frightening how easily he falls into this role. "About the patient, I mean."

"What's there to talk about? We treated him for the wrong condition. He lied and we got it wrong. The guy's dead because he didn't have the decency to answer our questions."

"But, he still died. It's always sad when someone dies."

House won't have that. He won't accept it.

He doesn't want Chase to learn blame and guilt and fault, not now. Not again.

"Patients die, Chase, sometimes by our hands. It's just part and parcel of the job. We can't let everyone that dies haunt us and hound us. It's just the way it is."

Those words will return in the future, will echo in Chase's head when another man's death returns to haunt him.

"I guess you learn to cope, after awhile," he says, thoughtfully. Poignantly.

Perhaps he will cope better, next time, when Dibala's face haunts his dream with such regularity that he wakes up panting and out of breath for so many nights in a row that his eyes become sunken and his skin turns pallid and grey.

Perhaps these words will soften the blow, a little, when he falls into that pattern, yet again.


	32. Chapter 46

_Aw to squeebunny – there will be fluff, I promise. There just had to be this first_.

**Part 46**

House's mind is like Pandora's Box, locked, bolted and compartmentalised in such a way that he cannot be altered, cannot be affected by the troubling elements of his world. He learned this function as a young man through a process of trial and error, tried any number of coping mechanisms until he found one that fit. Into the box they go, these grieving relatives, these dead patients, locked out of reach like his old man's bourbon.

It works. Somewhat.

He is under no illusions, though. He knows that the mind can only hide so much and that those imprisoned spectres will often seep through the keyholes when his guard is down and the mind can no longer contain them.

They often come in dreams, reaching out, clawing free, demanding attention.

_Look at me_, they say. _Do you remember me?_

_Look at me_, they cry, _why didn't you save me?_

Tonight, he dreams of a blood-caked man with intense eyes that have seen too much. He has thick, capable hands that will forever be red. Lady Macbeth tried to scrub hers clean in shame but not this man, not this one...

This one will twist the knife by proxy. He will see the blood as a necessity. He will feel nothing when he hears of fifteen year old boys with machetes culling in his name.

He sees it all as collateral damage. Human life, to this man, is irrelevant.

"I will take any action necessary to protect my people. Anything."

This man gristles with bloodstained teeth. This one etches promises so unrestful and so damaging that it sends shivers up House's non-tingling spine.

He doesn't feel nerves often. He rarely feels disgust.

He does when he hears the delusions of grandeur; as he watches this man claw his way up a self-built pedestal upon which to govern his world.

"None of you could make the decisions that fall on my shoulders. None of you could lead. None of you are strong enough to put yourself in my place."

"You call that leading?" House asks. "Because, I call it copping out. How hard is it to take a gun to all of your enemies? Sure beats trying to beat them with intellect and strategy."

In the dream Dibala is mocking. Mocking the world. Mocking life. He is demanding to be saved so that he can destroy the lives of others.

To live, so that he can kill.

_Save me so I can take more lives. Set me free to kill and rape and steal again, all in the name of power._

_Cure me so I can cause mass destruction though I'm so fragile, so fragile I will not lift a finger._

House holds no emotion as he speaks. He expresses only fact.

"Curing you would be like unleashing SARS. Ebola. You are a virus."

"I am _your_ virus. It's your job to cure me, not to eradicate."

The Hippocratic Oath is 'first do no harm' - but what if the end justifies the means? What if to kill one man is to save thousands more?

The killer judges them all. He rules over them with his politics and opinions and he tries to read them but fails.

"I see conflict in all of your eyes."

"We're all conflicted, Dibala. Even you."

"We're all pawns. Tools. We're all part of one great master plan."

"We are? I'd like to think we're all just soldiers of fortune."

Or, indeed, they could be harbingers of death. It wasn't House that dropped the A-bomb. This was Fat Man and Little Boy. The roles were defined and the stages set.

House watched as his boy loaded and fired where his girl could not. Chase was Little Boy. He dropped the bomb that killed and saved yet it's House that suffers the fallout.

Dibala's face is bloody and accusing, now, as the dream shifts and the doctor is faced with the aftershock.

He's white grey. He's speaking from a silver morgue table. There's a tag on his toe that offers his name but nobody really needs to ask.

His eyes are colourless and so is he.

"You're dead," House says, a statement of truth in this otherwise warped, deluded place.

"I'm dead by your hand."

Confusion wracks House's brain as he says "I didn't kill you. Chase did."

"He did the killing but you are to blame."

House didn't kill that man but Cameron wasn't wrong when she told him he ruined them all, when he placed death in their hands as he downplayed the value of human life.

"You armed him."

"No, I didn't."

"I led men into war but you are no better than me. You are the very same."

"**I'm nothing like you!"**

Chase was always sensitive to House's teachings. Now, he's just sensitive to House. He hears his voice raised in sleep. He hears him yelling and kicking and restless. It penetrates his own sleep, pushing through his medicated barriers.

**I'm nothing like you. **

He blinks hard, reaches for his glasses blindly. Looking at the clock on the wall he sees it is 3am.

**I'm nothing like you. **

It's more a stumble than a walk. Stiff. Awkward. He follows the voice. The words. The pain. The rage.

He follows the panic until he reaches House, tangled in sheets and bathed in

sweat.

His mouth twitches and moves.

"I'm nothing like you."

"House, wake up," Chase coaxes, and in his face there is worry. In his glazed eyes there is concern fighting through layers of Ambien that didn't hold him down tightly enough.

House raises his hands. He forces his eyes open. He half expects an African firing squad punishing him for another man's sins.

He is Jesus to God, arms outstretched.

_This is my mind – and, it will be given up for you. _

"You were yelling. Screaming. I thought you were having a fit or something, the way you were jerking around."

He finds his way back, House, finds his awareness. It's no monster. It's just Chase, vulnerable and disarmed.

It's just Chase – the culprit, the assailant, the man whose hands ended that man's life and now he's haunting someone else.

Look at him, so innocent, so unaware, so oblivious to the precarious nature of life.

"It was just a dream, Chase. No seizures. I'm not you."

"Was it…was it about the patient? You kept yelling. You sounded upset. Was it about the guy that died?"

In a manner of speaking, though not that patient.

_The patient YOU killed. The man YOU betrayed._

Chase is so susceptible, though. He's so sensitive. He wants to hear. To help. To listen.

"You can tell me, House. I'm a good listener."

He's not ready to be told. His grasp is so tentative, the thread so thin and brittle.

He's not ready to hear the truth.

"I'm fine," House lies. He spits the word out as he gathers himself. He seems agitated. His muscles are tense and thick and his nerves are aggravated and exposed. "Just go back to sleep. I don't want to be blamed for you falling asleep mid-session again."

"I was worried about you."

"Don't be."

"I could…I could stay in here, if you don't want to be alone."

It's a nervous suggestion. He used to do it for his mother when her dreams got out of control. He'd sleep on the floor at the foot of her bed like the obedient dog she often treated him as.

House just feels defensive. Unnerved.

"I don't need a babysitter, Chase."

He doesn't like being on the end of such concern. It bothers him. It offends him somehow but Chase looks so alarmed, as if he feels there is more. He frowns. He feels a tingle in his head.

_As if he knows something..._

"It's just - something doesn't feel right."

He shouldn't know. The boy shouldn't suffer.

God damn it, though, why should House?

"Worry about yourself, Chase. I'm a big boy. Everybody has bad dreams."

House has Chase's bad dreams so that the kid doesn't have to. He is punished for Chase's sins because, in a sense, he feels he is the cause of them.

He armed him, Cameron said. He gave the boy the nails so he could crucify himself.

_Father, why have you forsaken me?_

House knows that this is guilt, that these dreams and these thoughts assault him due to a feeling of responsibility.

It's such a Catholic concept.

It's such a biblical storm to weather and he hates it.

"Sleep, Chase," House says, though he's more demanding, now. He's loud. He's definitive. He's agitated, borderline aggressive. "How many times do I have to tell you how important sleep is for you?"

"House – "

"For Christ's sake, Chase."

The words are tough. Harsh.

Dibala's words were tough. Harsh.

"NOW."

Cutting. Angered. That voice hits Chase as if it's a physical blow. He reels back, a little, stung, but he pulls himself together.

"I just – "

" - I don't need you fussing over me. It's 3am. Just leave me alone."

_Leave me alone to atone for you. _

Chase folds his arms against himself, so young, so bewildered by this sudden change. He'd thought he was helping. He'd thought he was giving something in return.

He'd thought House might appreciate him offering something back as if this were payment, as if this were an offering to cover all of the care House has provided him with.

Perhaps he got it wrong, he thinks, as House demands space with such fury it's almost frightening.

"What did I do?" he asks so quietly, so meekly.

If only he knew.

If only he truly knew.


	33. Chapter 47

_Just another little snippet. Not promising it's any good but it does feature Cameron so be warned!_

**Part 47**

**

* * *

**

He's a good man - good for her, good for anyone, a pilot, in fact, who holds life in his hands just like any doctor does as he ferries people in the air. His passengers are all so implicitly trusting as he plays God and flies them closer to Heaven.

He's away a lot, long-haul. China. Japan. _Australia_. Perhaps that's what makes him perfect, the fact that their relationship has limits and constraints.

Once a month they spend the week together, a perfect relationship crammed into seven days whereas the rest is conducted via Skype and telephone.

"I love the sound of your voice," he tells her, as his own voice transcends the equator. She smiles when he asks what she's wearing, his voice a purring hum of arousal as she sits in sweat pants and no make up and tells him "I'm wearing that pink negligee you brought me back from Paris…"

He wines her (though he never brings home bottles of Sprite and fried chicken) dines her in the best restaurants (but none serve mussels in garlic and butter cooked just the way she likes them). He treats her like a princess (though, at times, he doesn't treat her like an equal).

He loves her (though his ways of showing it are more commercial ad nauseum than laid back spontaneity).

He's not as beautiful as Robert, nor is he as witty, as patient, as loyal. The fact remains, though, that he didn't kill a man. This man, for all his flaws, has never been so calculated as to take the life of another.

_She has._

_Cameron has._

_How could she judge Chase when she'd been the cause of someone's death, herself? _

He's not like Chase, that man she so desperately fought not to love, not like Chase, that man who killed so naively in the name of goodness and peace.

"I think I'll have the smoked haddock today," her partner says as the waiter stands before them and, as if her opinion doesn't quite count, he says "the lovely lady will have the same."

Sometimes it's easier to relinquish control. She's learned that, of late, that it's easier to place yourself into the hands of someone else so that you can never get anything wrong.

She's distracted and she knows it. This is the first time she's seen her lover since she saw Chase and it's playing on her mind.

"So," the man says. "Have you anything new to tell me?"

Such a loaded question, Cameron thinks, as she pores over the best way to answer.

"Just the usual," she says. "A few broken bones here and there, a few panicky new parents. A kid with a pencil shoved up his nose…"

Her laugh is half-hearted.

"Nothing to write home about."

She did see a young man recovering from a brain injury that has left him so altered and so unfamiliar that she didn't even recognise him, despite the fact his face still remains on a picture that's hidden underneath the paperwork in her kitchen drawer.

The man, Ian, catches her off-guard.

"Any news on your ex?"

"No," she lies. "Not that I've heard."

She hasn't heard. She's seen. It's hard to believe that boy she no longer knows is a murderer, let alone the man she shared a bed with, such innocence and sprightly youth in that pretty, pretty face. How different he had looked, though the face remained the same. She imagines the absence of herself in those bright eyes, eyes that had worshipped and adored her yet stared at her so blankly it was as if he'd never seen her.

That Chase hasn't.

That Chase doesn't know her, might never know her and she feels only shame - shame that she left him. Shame that she couldn't love him the way he deserved.

She loves him now, though. She loves him now he is out of her reach, removed and unobtainable, loves him now there are no ties, no commitments, no responsibility.

She misses him now the texts have dried up, those random little snippets of lost love flicking up on a cell phone window.

_Goodnight, Allison. I still love you._

_Happy Birthday. I'd send you a card if only I knew where you were. _

She had ignored his unrestrained expressions, conveniently switching her phone off and leaving him in the dark. She has no excuse for her behaviour other than that she didn't want to face his questions and pleas for answers even though he deserved them.

Only last week she fired up that phone and flicked through those little notes that came over a period of time and she found herself clicking 'reply'.

She knew Chase would never get the message, that his phone was a casualty of a 'collapse' he barely recovered from.

_I'm sorry_, the text said. _I did love you_.

She's such a coward she never said those words to her husband. Now, she never will.

Dragging herself out of the rut of memories she twirls her fork around the plate but none of the food makes it to her lips. They seem cold. Loveless. They don't seem a part of her.

"Are you okay?" Ian asks. He has greying hair that gives away their twenty year age gap but it doesn't matter.

Nothing matters.

She pulls the mask back on and tightens it fast. She smiles the smile that Chase would know was fake but Ian does not.

"I'm fine, babe. Just thinking of old times."

Old times. Old love. Mistakes she will never be able to fix.

Chase might have been comforted by her thoughts before. He might've felt good that she pitied his murderous soul and that in some ways she still loved him despite of it.

He doesn't care, now, for this Chase committed no crime, taking to extremes that old saying, "if you don't remember it didn't happen."

* * *

The Morning After has been nothing more than glares and silence and poorly hidden hurt, a man who cannot bring himself to acknowledge the hours before and a 'boy' who cannot forget them.

The night was spent in awkward sleep for House. Dark with unrest he felt plagued and tormented, haunted by the dead eyes of an old man whose death destroyed one man whereas his life would've destroyed thousands. His casualty was not of dark skin and black, black eyes but a fair haired young man who never quite managed to pick himself up again.

After that dream, neither did House. He never quite managed to rid the crawling from beneath his skin, the moths and maggots as opposed to butterflies in his stomach.

For Chase it was a night spent fighting rest and working himself up into a blind state where he hated, resented and misunderstood on cycle. He concluded that the overriding feeling was anger, vowing internally that House will be sorry for yelling, for snapping, for making him feel small.

When morning comes he hates that he has to look at him. Talk to him. Be around him. He sits down for breakfast only because he has to, would rather be anywhere else but here. The creature that kicked and screamed and blamed last night is watching his every move.

He wants to glare at it but he can't bring himself to look up.

"Good morning," the older man says, though his voice is cautious and restrained. He doesn't want to step on the mines. He doesn't want fireworks or explosions, the jeers or the tantrums.

The boy says nothing. He just stares into a glass of water as if searching for reflection but without his glasses he sees only shapes and motion.

House asks if he slept well, a 'filler' question born out of uncomfortable quiet and instantly knows it was the wrong thing to say. He cannot abort the abomination of his usually pleasant words and, as they are released unto the world, he is sorry for them.

He sees an inexpressive face fight back a quip or a comeback. It struggles for neutrality but then fails. House wonders how many times Rowan saw it, how often he ignored it.

"You look tired, kid."

_Kid_. He's not a fucking child. Those eyes flash up suddenly and it's devastating, that look. It's charged. It's brimming. Chase drops his spoon in that milky, high-calorie cereal that they force upon him and stands up to leave without touching it.

Again, he says nothing but those eyes screamed louder than life.

Before he can bite his tongue, House asks "You're not going to eat that, then?"

That is met with a bitter laugh.

At times like this, House is sorry Chase improved, not on a mental but physical level. With the plaster removed from his leg he relies on only an air boot, removable for therapy and allowing him to place full weight. It permits him to walk away like the petulant teenager he never got to be.

Rowan never let him walk away.

"Chase -"

Without a word, the young man leaves House drowning in the suffocating mess he made of last night, in the post-dream chaos he has caused.

"You have to talk to me some time," he calls out.

But, why should he?

His absence at the table is profound.

House just sits there gazing at the empty space that's left.

* * *

Chase sits on the end of his bed and stares at his hands. He feels empty. Blank. He feels scolded and abused and he doesn't know why.

He wonders if this is an overreaction, those heightened emotions his neurologists consider so 'normal'.

Then he remembers House's face, his fury, his expression of unexplained blame.

_What did I do?_

He doesn't know what he did or why he deserved it, why House was undoubtedly looking at him as if the object of his nightmare was_ his_ fault. It makes him feel uneasy and House's awkward attempt at brushing it off this morning just makes him feel angry.

He never told him he was sorry. His mother always apologised and he hated the fact that he always forgave her but somehow this is worse. To act like it never happened is just painful.

He swallows his own discomfort as he attempts to get dressed, won't swallow his pride and ask House to help him. It's painful. It hurts. He takes the pain because it's better than giving in. He endures because he's proud.

He needs nothing and nobody.

"Chase, open the door and let me help you, for Christ sake."

The words go ignored, too little too late.

He learned early on that he can manage alone.

Even when the walls were crashing down and his whole life was tumbling from his mother and father's drunken, absent indifference, he survived.

* * *

"Are you going to keep this up all day?"

Just a sorry would probably suffice but it's endurance. House has gone too far, now, can't bring himself to say those words which so many consider the hardest in the English language. It's not a matter of pride but a matter of personality. The words might build up and push but he can't set them free.

Not now.

Too much has been made of this, now.

"At least tell me what time you think you'll be done today so I can organise a babysitter."

"Just drive" Chase says, staring dead ahead, offering nothing at all. He can be so cold when he wants to be. He learned, inevitably, not to care but that's not enough for House.

House wants reaction. Secretly, and perhaps tellingly, House wants Chase to scream back and so he pushes. He pushes hard. He pushes with sarcasm and with bitterness.

He pushes with negative emotion.

"Great, Chase. Real mature. You must be so proud of yourself for freezing up like this."

"And, you must be so proud for making me feel like shit and not telling me what I did wrong so I guess we're even."

It wasn't exactly a heated reaction but it was a start.

When he looks House in the eye there's passion and warfare.

"Don't talk to me again."

He means that. He means every word. Don't talk to me, he says, and it's a literal thing.

House finds himself at a loss on how to proceed with the sulking, petulant teenager that he has and has hurt.

He drives, as requested.

He says nothing, as ordered.

* * *

"Baby duck got angry because Papa duck quacked loudly at him last night. Now baby duck won't quack at all."

The voice is whiny and theatrical.

"What must a Papa duck do?"

He slams his cane onto Cuddy's desk, scattering her papers to the ground like jagged little snowflakes. He demands her attention in the same way that Rachel demands it by screaming, by crying, by throwing her toys out of the cot or the stroller.

It's so…primitive. So infantile, just as House has always been.

"What does Papa duck do? The world is so silent without baby duck's voice."

He puts aside his resentment of this perfect, imperfect woman because he needs for her to guide him. She looks up at him, blue eyes full of something akin to fascination.

"House. Greg. Are you asking me for _parenting advice_?"

Her look is bewildered. Incredulous. House thinks it makes her nose look bigger but it's not the time or the place to be putting her off side.

"You yelled at him and now you want me to tell you how to make it all better?"

House pauses for a second to take in her words. Is that what he's doing? Is that truly what he's asking for?

"Who said anything about me? This is a question of ducks."

He doesn't like the smile on her face, doesn't like the fact that he reads her expression as mocking, as humoured, as totally amazed that he could possibly feel some kind of responsibility, parental or otherwise, towards another human being.

She misreads him so often.

"My God," she says, "I don't believe it."

Is it so unbelievable that he wants to do right by this kid? Is that so hard to understand?

Cuddy knows House. She knows the nuances, the flecks, the tiny threads that hold him together. She should know, therefore, that to make too much out of a good deed, on House's part, is to ruin it - to place too much emphasis on his actions, indeed, is to destroy them.

Jokes can only go so far.

He glares at her, disenchanted by her insistence upon insulting him without saying the words.

"Forget it," he says, as he decides upon denial. "Your ovaries don't work. Your eggs are all haggard and useless. What's to say there's anything maternally useful in you at all?"

He shouldn't have gone to her. God even knows what he was thinking.

He'll go to Wilson, instead.


	34. Chapter 48

_More random. More probably crap. So sorry :/_

**Part 48**

The answer Wilson gives is a simple one born straight from the mind of a simple man, a thoughtful man, a man whose shoulders hold the weight of so many worlds upon it.

There may well be a cane in House's hand at any given time but Wilson is the crutch, the weight-bearer, the one who holds him steady. That's always been the way. If House looks backwards into the recesses of his own history, many a woman has arrived and succumbed but little Jimmy Wilson was always there in the background, willing, able, eager to pick up the pieces.

One might say Wilson was his 'soul mate' if one were writing for a weekly ladies' magazine though the term itself is irrelevant to House, who believes in no soul, no spirit and no Heaven.

He believes in no God, no father, no Almighty, no maker of Heaven and Earth.

"Take him home," Wilson tells him. "Take him back to his apartment and let him sniff around."

"He's not a Yorkshire Terrier."

"Just..give him something of himself back."

As a suggestion it seems way off the mark but there's logic to it, logic that House doesn't see at his moment in time for he's looking through clouded lenses.

"What's this got to do with me yelling at him?"

"Nothing."

"I asked you how I can get him to open up since I've shut him down like a worn down Atari and you tell me to take him home?"

House doesn't expand upon it, doesn't tell Wilson the 'gist' of the dream or the sub-text of Chase's involvement. The 'truth' is locked away inside of him just as it's locked away inside of Chase.

House never wants that truth released in the boy for its dangers are untold.

Wilson sighs as he attempts to spell it out in terms that House might relate to. He's an intelligent man but his 'human' skills have always been lacking. It's his flaw, fatal in a sense. It's his one true weakness and downfall.

"Give him something he wants. Distract him. Take his mind off it. One moment of irrational aggression might not seem so important if he's got a whole new world to snoop around in."

Wilson recommends indulgence - overwhelm his senses with new things and he might well forget about a meaningless event such as that which occurred last night. It's bribery in a sense but what parent hasn't tried to creep around an issue by affording their child something they perhaps should not be allowed?

"He feels isolated," Wilson says softly, and the tone is shifty; conspiratorial. "I told him I wouldn't tell you but it's starting to get him down. He knows you're trying to protect him but he feels he needs to jump back in there."

"Back in where? Back into the shoes of the orphaned divorcee? Those aren't shoes I'd want to fill if I had a chance to kick them away, Wilson. Can't we get him some better shoes?"

It seems like the last place House would want him diving into. The fact is, however, that human beings are imperfect creatures and the rough must always be taken along with the smooth.

Chase's life has never been smooth – but, then, has House's?

"Just…give him something back, House. It's important. Take him home. I guarantee he'll be eating out of your hand for the foreseeable future if you just do that for him. Put aside your need to protect him for just one minute and let him have this."

Protect. Control. The word doesn't matter. Wilson has experienced House's brand of 'protective'.

Sometimes it's just…flawed.

(*)

He's reluctant at first, petulance still at the forefront of his behaviour, but he softens when House promises him something useful, something worthwhile.

"_Something that might answer some of your droning, persistent questions."_

House drives. He drives Chase to a place he once knew, a place that was once his haven and his shelter from the storm that was his life.

It was the place he made love to his wife and the place he later watched her leave; the place he carried her over the threshold and the place he watched her carry herself away from it.

This place is the scene of many a loving moment and also many a crime but it's Chase's place and that's all that matters.

That's all that's of importance, here.

(*)

"This is my place," Chase says, and he doesn't need to be told.

He touches the banister as if he's never touched one before, traces the petal of a bush that grows beneath the glass. "Someone's been watering the plants in the flower box. Who would do that?"

House says nothing of his semi-polite plea for the landlady to make sure Chase's place is kept the way that he left it; to preserve it as if in formaldehyde for when he is to return.

_Give him my love_, she'd said. _Such a sweet boy._

_Give him my thoughts_, she'd cooed. _Such a polite young man. _

"I guess the flower fairy's been paying a visit. Obviously, she took over from the tooth fairy. Bitch got laid off. She was a drunk just like your Mom."

Chase doesn't rise to the bait. He's too busy taking this in.

This is home. This place, designed by Cameron and decorated by Chase, is the place where his life was built and broken; the place where he lived, breathed and existed up until a very, very short time ago.

"Take a look around," House says, though the hand on Chase's arm is that of a man who is reluctant to let go of the leash. He doesn't want Chase to fly away. He doesn't want him to run before he can walk. Chase touches that hand gently as if asking to be released, as if searching for permission to tentatively walk back into his old life under another man's watchful gaze.

House feels his heart sink as Chase crosses the threshold because he doesn't want to lose the boy to this.

"I remember this place," Chase says, and before House can question this sudden epiphany, Chase clarifies. "Remy had a picture of me on her cell phone. I was on that couch there. I looked a little worse for wear. Apparently, we'd been partying and she wanted some collateral."

He'd been wearing only a t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, long hair plastered to a feverish-looking brow. Their night had been such beautiful madness, a blow-off after a difficult case, a few hours of mindless solace after she and Foreman had collided with such force it had left her winded. They weren't close friends but they did find a common ground in the months following the breakdown of both of their relationships.

Chase finds he misses her, now that she's gone.

He sits down on that very same couch and touches the arms, hoping the tactile act will bring it all back to him like a shower of fallen memories. It doesn't, but he does feel comfortable here.

He leans back and looks up at the ceiling.

"Could do with a good paint job," he comments, as he points to a patch near the light fixture that looks like it hasn't been touched. The truth is he hadn't gotten round to it. It's so very Chase to find the one imperfection; the one thing he hasn't done amongst the hundreds of things that he has. "I like the light, though."

"Very Dynasty," House pipes up.

"Yeah, not something I would've chosen but it's cool."

House smiles at that, remembering the quiet demands of a catalogue queen and the tolerant acceptance of a young man that just wanted to please her. He remembers tester carpet cuttings and wood panels scattered all over the table at lunch.

He remembers Chase trying his best to look interested when Cameron talked of colour schemes and 'themes' when all he wanted was a couch and a TV that showed sports and old movies, just like his mother used to watch.

"Trust me, you didn't choose anything in this place. That's a woman thing."

"I lost a lot of my brain, House, but I do know that much."

Everything is left just the way it was before his accident. It's funny to think that he walked in bare feet across this very floor only weeks ago; that he slept on this very couch out of fear of being swallowed by the bed that she chose.

It's not hard for House to imagine him lying alone on that couch staring up at the very ceiling he's just commented upon seeing only a black man's face dripping with blood and the eyes of a corpse blaming him for its state of decomposition.

He wonders in this moment why he didn't care enough back then; why he went with bystander behaviour even though he_ knew_ nobody else would give a damn.

He doesn't want to see Chase go through that again, will protect this secret with his life. He believes that Chase's God would understand the lie in the same way that he would understand Chase's 'choice' back then.

One lie will save a life.

One death would save thousands.

"Don't you want to look around?" he asks, when his mind clears enough for him to focus on the job at hand. "You could piss in a few corners to re-mark your territory if you felt like it. I promise I won't judge."

"No," Chase smiles, and thank God for Wilson in this moment because all of the badness and all of the anger has drained away; has seeped back into this couch like his body does. "I think I'll just sit here for awhile, if that's okay."

He just wants to take it all in. He just wants to meditate on this for a few moments before he embarks upon his journey of discovery. He just wants to breathe the air of his own place and wonder what kind of things that he has done within these walls.

"So many things here," he states. "So many things to pick at and try to make sense of."

It's daunting in a way but in another way it's exhilarating because a vast number of pieces are here in this place, tens and hundreds of fragments ready to be pieced together if only he can find the strength to do it.

"It even smells like home."

House sits down on the other couch and watches, watches as this calmness washes over Chase, this quiet serenity that's enchanting. Enticing. He watches as the young man closes his eyes, as he breathes deep and calming breaths.

"I'm sorry I was so mad at you," the boy says, though his eyes don't open and his position doesn't move. His head still rests back and his hands are still grasping at the leather beneath him as if it's his second-skin. "I just didn't like the way you made me feel."

This is the chance. This is the opportunity.

This is the place that word fits in so nicely.

_Sorry._

"It wasn't about you," House tells him and, though it's not the entire truth it's not a complete lie either. "I was just dreaming."

"About what?"

_Please don't ask. _

"About…things. Bad things. Things that happened but aren't important any more."

"Things you did?"

_Things we both did._

"In a sense."

"Things I did?"

This is House's chance to take the weight. This is his opportunity to relieve the pressure. He has often looked at Chase and wondered who ever relieved him of responsibility? Who ever shouldered the blame for him?

Who ever shared his burdens when they grew so heavy that they weighed him down?

He remembers eyes so dull and so lifeless that House felt certain that Chase would die in his sleep, remembers Cameron speaking of a broken man cracked and desecrated by House's own hands.

He won't break him again.

"It doesn't matter what it was," he says, finally. "It's nothing for you to worry about. It was just a dream."

Let me do the worrying, he thinks.

Let me carry this for you.

Chase bites his lip. He feels the skin between his teeth and has the frightening urge to bite down. He doesn't, though.

His frustration is passing, as the time goes by.

"I shouldn't have acted like such an idiot. I can be such an arse sometimes."

Chase whispers the words as he turns his head, as he peeps at House through one beautiful, blameless eye.

House smiles, off the hook at least for now.

"Guess it's a family trait."

"Does that make you family?"

Chase smiles, a ghost of his old self.

In a sense.

In a sense, it does…


	35. Chapter 49

_I'm not being purposely evil to Cameron, by the way. I just feel that he needs to get over her on a conscious level. He needs to work through the feelings. He needs closure. _

**Chapter 49**

His explorations remind House of a little boy who has finally been let loose in a candy store after months of darkness and incarceration. He's a young man that's never seen light, in this moment, like one of those Fritzl children who emerged into a world that was both new and old – a world that had always been there and yet they had not been permitted to touch it.

Chase has seen his own recent life only through words and anecdotes. To protect him, he hasn't been allowed near it - yet here he is, trying to piece it together in the one place it all fits inside.

"You ever been here before?" he asks.

"I was here picking up some stuff for you. Other than that? No. I'm not the kind of boss that makes home visits and you're not the kind of minion that needs me to."

The truth is, there have been times when House has wanted to sweep on by this place just to make sure Chase isn't doing something stupid. So young, he looks, and House always felt that he needed supervision during the times he was screwing up but there was nobody who actually cared enough to do it.

Aside from that, he was simply curious at how the man lived; how what he equated to be a spoiled little rich boy existed in a place like this.

Chase was never rich. Before Cameron, he was never indulgent, either. It was his wife who picked out the furnishings, the paintings on the walls, the designer cutlery in the kitchen.

She's taken a lot of it with her; has stripped him down in more ways than one.

"My old place was smaller than this. Anne was into lava lamps and I hated the things. I used to like making things, actually. I made a table. It was pretty good. For awhile, I wanted to be a carpenter…"

"Like Joseph? God, you really do take the bible to heart, don't you?"

Chase smiles.

"I just wanted to create."

"Never saw you as the creative type."

"Well, you don't know me, then, do you? Anne was an artist. She had her canvass and her dust sheets and she'd make something so beautiful out of nothing at all."

He looks down at his palms. Even now, they're not callused. They're smooth, just like they always were.

"I just liked to use my hands."

"That's why you became a surgeon. You 'made' something out of human beings."

"I wasn't a plastic surgeon, House."

"No, that's Taub. We both know he only does that so he can touch women's bodies without being charged with sexual assault."

Chase touches the black granite surface of the kitchen and it feels smooth and cold.

"It's a nice place," he says, "but there's no life here."

No personal touch. No beauty. No soul. This place, he thinks, was modelled from the pages of a magazine. His old place was modelled on life, love, spirit and art.

He looks over at the corner of the living room and he suddenly pines for that lava lamp…

"It's all so very…"

"…sterile?" House asks.

Chase nods his head.

He moves back to that surface in all its smoothness, in all its coldness though, try as he might, he can't imagine standing here. He can't imagine spreading peanut butter on bread at this very counter, nor can he imagine reaching within this fridge for a beer.

He chooses to ignore the note that House found so telling on the door, Cameron and Yoga, the words of a woman who still calls her husband by the last name they share. She called him Robert when he pissed her off, just like his mother used to. He was 'Robbie' to Susan Chase and to Rowan he was 'boy'.

To House, he is just who he always was before.

"I have a cat?" Chase asks, referring to the clean, empty bowl on the kitchen surface. He doesn't remember a cat, remembers only Callie, the dog he loved and lost, the dog who brought him through so much as a young man that he's more thankful to her than he is to the family that brought him into the world.

"Had," House replies. "Cameron got custody. I guess you didn't want to drag it through the courts. They always favour the Mom."

"It's a good job we never had children."

House blanches at the thought. "You don't even know the half of it."

Thoughtfully, Chase touches the bowl. He tries to imagine a creature with it face pressed into the porcelain but there's not even a flash; not such much as a fleeting feline face pressing its body against his legs as it whines for food and attention.

His voice is distant as he says: "I like cats."

He likes their aloofness, their picky natures, their desire for affection as and when they need it but nothing more. Nothing more than that.

"I like animals. They're so…unconditional."

"You never did take to Steve McQueen," House says, in passing, though he doesn't explain the meaning behind the name, nor does he explain that it's a rat and not a musician.

Chase just looks at him with his head tilted just how that rat used to do it.

"You're a strange man," he says, though he's one to talk.

He's one to throw stones.

(*)

Nothing transcends the barrier.

Nothing filters through.

"It's just useless," Chase sighs as he presses his face into the couch. hiding from the world.

The brow furrows as he strains, as he fights for concentration. He tries to focus thoughts he often has trouble with. This is a new tactic and he's not accustomed to it. He's more used to poring over words and pictures that don't equate to him.

This is actually immersing himself.

"Don't force yourself," House reminds him. "We don't want your head caving in like it did last time. Just let it come. If it doesn't so be it."

"It's just – "

Chase bites his lip in frustration.

" – gah."

He lifts that cushion up to his face and for a moment, it appears he's trying to suffocate himself with it.

Then, something changes and he stops dead. He stills.

It's not the thoughts that make him shift. It's not the forcing of issues, nor is it the mass of visual images he's been assaulted with.

It's something else that gives him a flash, a flash so vivid it makes him physically jerk.

His eyes open. He turns around, pulling that cushion along with him. His eyes look both wild and confused, both focused and distracted. Again, he frowns only this time there's something in it.

He lifts the cushion to his face, feels the texture against his skin. The scents trigger something in him. It never happened like this before but as he inhales the cushion he sees her; sees her like he's fleetingly remembered her before but not like this. Not like this.

It's so evocative. It's so…strong. It's not definitive. It's not clear. It's not a particular memory but something else.

This cushion relates to her.

"What is it?" House asks. "Is something wrong?"

Chase doesn't answer. He's falling, now, falling backwards, emotionally, experiencing something he's never experienced and it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming in the sense that he can't speak, is rendered dumb by whatever this is.

It assaults him viciously but tellingly and he swallows hard as he tries to come to terms with it.

It's a huge rush of something that hits him hard. It touches him in the same way a tornado touches land – quickly and without reservation; mercilessly, in a sense. It doesn't care if it destroys him. It's just twists and pummels and attacks him from the inside.

"It smells like her," he says, finally, though he's not in this room. He's not in this world. "God, I can – I feel – "

" – you feel what?"

"Everything."

He feels a great rush of love so fierce it causes him to push backwards, a feeling so intense it takes his breath away. He closes his eyes as he tries to make more sense of this but nothing comes to mind.

"You remember?"

"No, but…yes."

He doesn't see himself lying on this couch with the woman in those pictures. He doesn't see himself doing anything at all, but he feels. God, he feels.

It's the feelings he remembers, if not the person.

He remembers what she did to him on an emotional level.

"It's a sensory memory," House says, softly. "Let it come. Don't be scared. Just ride with it."

"Sense memory," Chase repeats.

"The smell of the cushion, it's opened something up. It's not unheard of. It's how a blind person remembers."

"I'm not blind…"

"No, but you're damaged. Don't question it, Chase. Just run with it."

It's a progression of emotions and, as he pushes harder he begins to feel something different; something less pleasant than overwhelming love.

His smile fades as his thoughts progress.

He begins to feel regrets. Sorrow. Loss, even.

His feelings begin to evolve, just like their relationship did.

It's a deep sadness he feels, now. It steals a part of him, this sensation of love had and love lost, of something he held that then fell away from his grasp.

"Oh…"

He's felt this before as the debilitating, stifling feeling of abandonment takes over from where security once was and he knows, in this moment, that Cameron was the one that left him in the same way that Anne left him.

He didn't want her to go. He didn't want either of them to go.

God, they did this to him.

"I still loved her," he whispers, and House doesn't want to hear this. "When she left I still loved her."

He exhales, a quiet murmuring sound escaping his lips as everything he felt for his wife moves around him, though he doesn't quite understand it. He wanted her so much. He knows that, now. This kind of sadness doesn't come out of ill-defined emotion.

"She left me in such a state," he says, feeling each and every kick and blow to the psyche that she dealt him. His voice breaks. So does House."I don't know why but I feel it."

"Yeah, she was a real piece of work," House says because Chase was so stoic back then but, deep down, House knew he was cut into tiny pieces.

Here it is. Here it is, emoting from a boy that doesn't even remember the woman.

Here it is on show from a kid that deserves so, so much more.

"She wouldn't have left you, though, House."

No. No, she wouldn't.

She would've stayed around. She would've tried to 'fix' him like she always did.

She never wanted to fix her husband.

"Always mine, Chase, but never quite yours. Like I said, she loved you in her own way but you were never me."

It sounds so harsh when spoken aloud.

Chase's eyes flash open and he pushes the cushion away, overwhelmed by the images it placed within him, such heart-rending pain, rotten joy that once was.

There she is on the table, a woman he loved, a woman he lost.

He picks up the picture that he got nothing from, the image that doesn't sit right with him. He looks confusingly at that glowing woman in a white gown and says, softly "She's not even my type."

He pushes it away like he pushes that cushion away, tries to rid himself of her, of the feelings she brought out in him - feeling too strong and too fierce for a young man of his mental capacity to cope with.

"If this is what my life was, House, then I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want sorrow and loss and fucking abandonment again. I was happy just with you."

House looks…stunned.

"They keep telling me it's better for you if you remember, Chase, but I don't believe a word they say. Why remember this? What are you going to get from it?"

The only word that Chase utters is a "Closure."

(*)

He smiles when he picks up an item that House recognises, an item he hasn't seen in a long, long time.

Chase brings it up to his face but he knows without thought what this is.

"I stole this from you," he smiles, as he bounces that small, blue ball against the floor. "Get the feeling it really pissed you off."

"I let you have it," House retorts, belittling the memory but lightening the mood. "You always looked so happy when you were throwing that thing around. I felt I had to make up for those Christmasses when Santa never showed."

"He always showed for me. I was a good boy."

The fact that Santa bought him books and chemistry sets rather than the bikes and Nintendo games he asked for doesn't really come into play.

He keeps that for himself.

Of all the items in this place that Chase chooses to take with him it's that little blue ball, cherished and meaningful and perhaps the only thing that triggers something good in him.

House feels a small victory at that.


	36. Chapter 50

_A really small 'Cuddy' part…just because. _

**Part 50**

It looks like a poor waste of 'work' time as two of her employees 'play ball' on the verge in front of her window. Usually she'd take a dim view of it. House is a notorious time waster, forever cutting into his clinic hours with solitary games of catch against his office wall or one-man yoyo tournaments that go on well past his allocated lunch break.

Lucas refers to House as an 'obsessive slacker with no real cardiac awareness' and, though she doesn't appreciate his need to judge she cannot argue with his words.

He is a slacker. He is obsessive.

She feels there's a heart in there somewhere, however, if he could only get his Satellite Navigation System to locate it for him.

It's different today.

House's 'slacking' is authorised by Cuddy herself, his 'games' a form of physio designed to keep 'his' patient interested and motivated.

At the age of seven Chase wanted to be 'a Socceroo' and, though these exercises are designed to strengthen his arm, not his leg, he still insists on a World Cup ball with which to indulge his doctors' demands of him.

"It's bigger. Easier to catch. I can kill two birds with one stone and teach House Aussie Rules because your 'soccer' is pathetic."

He's judgemental when it comes to such things, always has been.

Boys will be boys.

Cuddy watches as House sits on the ground and throws the football to Chase who awkwardly attempts to catch it. He fails frequently but it's his determination that is beautiful to watch as he gets up, as he picks himself off the ground, dusts himself off and tries again.

He looks so happy out there, catching, retrieving, throwing an underarm and trying to catch House off-balance. In this moment, he reminds her of her nephew Jonah, twenty-three years old, now, and always the wayward child. Determined. Young. Stronger than he looked - younger than he looked, too.

Jonah had large blue eyes that melted the hearts of the mothers at school. He coaxed the little girls in when he fluttered those dark, dark eyelashes and could wrap his mother around his little finger.

Those beautiful eyes had no effect on his father, though. Not Jacob, who was harsh on his son, whose expectations were so high that Jonah always, always failed to reach them.

Cuddy hasn't seen Jonah since he was nineteen years old. That's when he left. That's when he cut all ties. That's when he said goodbye to his 'biological' family and took on another family entirely.

"I love you," he often told his dad, "but, you're wearing me down."

Jonah felt suffocated by his strict, Jewish upbringing, belittled by a father that placed no value in the US Army or its recruits. He labelled them murderers, mindless killing machines dictated to by someone other than God and less than the devil.

"You soldiers," he said, "you pick up a gun and you don't care where the bullet goes. They take you apart, piece by piece, and they put you together as if you're nothing more than an AK-47. You're brainwashed, Jonah."

"I'm fighting for my country. Can't you understand that? I sucked at school. I'm never going to be a brain surgeon, Dad, but this is my way of giving something back."

"Giving back? Giving what back? Each and every time you pick up that gun you sell a little bit more of our soul."

Jacob drew the line at calling his chosen profession blasphemy but the implication was always there.

"God or War, son, Your choice."

God or war, there is no grey in between.

Jonah left one night after a blazing row. Cuddy heard about it through her sister, Julie, whose tearful voice left message after message on her answering machine stating 'her baby had gone' and 'her little boy had flown away'.

"He's not coming back", she said. "Jacob's driven him to Hell and back."

Jonah never even said goodbye to the aunt that sat with him as a child; who taught him to count using plastic soldiers they hand-painted together.

That was five years ago.

The last she heard, Jonah was a decorated soldier. He'd done two tours of Iraq and had returned both times to a wife that loved him more than words can say. Cuddy never imagined him settling down, always imagined the cheeky little boy that would steal her lipstick so that he could paint the sidewalk red.

She wonders if he's happy, if she'll ever get to meet his two little girls, twins, eighteen months old and, judging by their photograph, proud owners of their daddy's eyes. It kills her that Rachel will never know her cousin; that Jonah will never be a part of the little girl's life but sometimes, people are just driven apart.

Sometimes, people just need to get away.

As she looks at Chase, now, she sees Jonah before he left, a young man playing ball in the back yard with her father, painfully frail but always finding energy for his young grandson - always with that 'need' to play the role of cliché with his only boy.

Seeing Chase so free and so youthful reminds her of what they all lost and proves, beyond reason, that sometimes, fathers just don't deserve their children.

Rowan Chase certainly didn't deserve his intelligent, beautiful son.

The ball dances towards her window. She smiles as she knocks on the glass, as she gathers the young man's attention. Chase looks up suddenly, that soft, blue baseball cap pulled down tight to keep the sun from his eyes. His cheeks are pink and his expression is both exhausted and exhilarated.

She sees his lips form her name but she doesn't hear his voice.

"Hey," he says, soundlessly.

He holds his hand up and waves at her and upon his face is the most beautiful smile, so charming, so unabashed. Cuddy doesn't recall Chase ever smiling like that before. She never recalls ever seeing him so unreserved as that with his eyes sparkling in sunlight and his face so beaming and pure.

She lifts her hand and waves back.

He pushes himself up closer and now, she hears his words as he leans against the wall and window.

"He's doing this on purpose," he says. "Either that or he can't throw for shite."

She laughs as she raises her eyebrow.

Then, she sees it, something unforgiving in its force against her breastbone. It penetrates bone and sinew, cartilage and blood as it settles in her beating, throbbing heart.

It's unspeakable.

It's unbelievable.

The thing that hits her harder than the beauty of Chase's young, expressive face is House's.

Lying in the sun and yelling for Chase to return, that face is brimming with pride, with free-spirited happiness.

_With love, even…_

"Stop hitting on the boss and get over here. I'm not here for the good of my own health, Chase. This isn't exactly fun for me."

It's funny, to Cuddy, how his words don't match his face, how his statement is so far removed from the 'vibe' he puts out there.

Tonight, when Lucas asks her of House, of his behavioural issues, of his 'line-crossing antics', Cuddy will think back to this moment. She will think back to this feeling, to this image, to this expression and, she will put Lucas in his place with her own soft tone, with words of absolution uttered from red-painted lips.

"He might be a pain in my ass – "

" – your perfect ass – "

" – but, he's a good man."

"Since when?"

"What do you mean, since when? He's a good man. He just hides it well."

Lucas will bury his face in her breasts as he says "No, he's not."

She will define House as 'good' though Lucas has always seen him as something different. She will utter these passable judgements, though Lucas will not believe one word of them knowing only the sneak, the spy, the man with no morals, the man that makes his girlfriend's job so much more difficult that it needs to be.

"He's an ass."

"When you peel back the layers he's not so heartless."

She's determined. Her kind words, to Lucas, are misplaced, but he'll be too far enveloped in her body to argue.

He can be a man of such few words when the 'mood' takes him, as it often does when faced with her black lace bra and the panties, so dark against her tinted-alabaster skin.

"Whatever you say," he will say, as he kisses the nape of her neck, as he presses his thumbs into the tense muscles of her shoulder-blades. "You're too good to him, babe. You're too easy on him."

Maybe she is, she will think, but House has never been easy on himself, either, forever sentenced to his own solitude because in a sense he hates himself too much to connect.

As she kisses her boyish, blue eyed lover goodnight she will be struck by one single, excruciating thought about another boyish, blue-eyed man she so easily could've loved –did, in fact; a man she couldn't wait for.

_Could he ever have smiled that way for me? Could he ever have given over to the thing he feared the most if it had been me that trusted him to do so? _

The question takes her smile away as she tries her best to enjoy her 'consolation prize' because Lucas is a good guy and her daughter loves him like a playmate that rolls around on the ground with her – but, he's not House.

That open-spirited smile of this afternoon re-defines House.

In a manner of speaking, it makes him the one that got away.


	37. Chapter 51

_In which Chase finds a friend and severs ties with useless baggage…_

**Page 51**

Chase loves this place, this little haven in the midst of the big city. It's like a flower growing in a nuclear wasteland; like a rose at Hiroshima.

The park lies five minutes away from Princeton Plainsboro and it's the Eden that Remy kept from him, fearing him unable to travel this short, short distance. House brought him here a few nights ago when he couldn't sleep despite his meds, the equivalent of a parent strapping their newborn into a car and hoping the motion of the vehicle will rock it to sleep.

It's a place House often comes to think, though he'd never come clean and confess that.

"Even the vagrants here are considerate," he'd said, as they'd observed an old man of around sixty-five laid out beneath a bench reading an old newspaper that would later become his blanket and shelter.

In the moonlight, the water of the pond had reflected so beautifully that just the rippling motion of the water had soothed Chase. He enjoys it, the sound falling down from that fountain beneath the trees. It's peaceful. It's comforting. It calms the storm in his head that's been threatening for a day or so, now.

This morning he awoke sluggish, lethargic and riddled with Tinnitus. House told him it's simply the bells ringing out for Christmas but it's October and the words don't amuse. It left him feeling incredibly low, the tiredness combined with the constant noise and the background pain.

House had asked him if he was ready for a bright new day with such reckless cheerfulness he'd wanted to scream and crack it but instead he'd shook his head, causing the ache to burn that deeper.

"I don't want anything today," he had replied. "I just want to sit alone in the park and wait for night."

"What are you, Edward Cullen?"

"Who?"

"God, if only more of the world were as damaged as you are."

Chase had again re-iterated his desire. He'd take a book, a sandwich, maybe. He wouldn't waste the day moping around but he wanted to be alone. Just the thought of people made him tense up, his jaw clenched and his patience worn.

In his 'old' life, he would've just taken himself off to the library, would've cried off seeing patients and cited 'research' as a valued escape clause. He had moments where the thought of interaction filled him with such dread that it made him angry.

House had asked him if he could find his way back, ordered Chase to recite the route to him by memory before writing it down. He's quite willing to cut the ties and let him venture out alone but it's important to know he's capable of returning.

"I want you home by 5."

"You won't even be home from work by then."

"5, or I lock the front door and you go nowhere."

Chase had realised an impasse had been reached and he had no more leeway. He understood the logic. It starts getting dark around 5. The streets become busy and the roads fill with rush-hour traffic.

They've learned that noise disorientates Chase, that he becomes uncomfortable in crowds and busy places and so a curfew of 5, though seemingly childish, had been a logical choice.

"Fine. I'll be home by 5,"

He'd tried to remember the last time he'd had anyone care enough to tell him when to be home by but had drawn a blank.

He's been here an hour and a half. It's a warm, Autumn day and the world around him is golden brown. The leaves fall like crisp blankets and he appreciates the 'feel' of them beneath his feet.

He loves the scent of wet grass, so evocative, this place, and within him it awakens so much.

Regardless of any of that, though, the ringing in his head has stopped.

The book Chase has brought is called 'Taking Control of your Life'. House found it amusing that his neuro-psych doctors felt the need to hand him something so laughably ironic. They've picked up on the tension he feels at being this helpless, at relying upon others so fully. They've given him this 'tool' to try to combat it.

The book lies untouched beside him because Chase feels in control right now. Sat here on this wooden bench facing trees and grass and nature-amidst-madness, he feels a sense of peace with everything. How could one not feel peace in a place like this? How could one not feel in control when finally permitted to be alone?

He's not alone for long, though the 'companion' is not one of medicine, nor is it one of patronising 'support'. It comes out of the blue, a little blast from Chase's past, a little fleeting glimpse into the man he once was.

He's jogging in blue sweats and a white hooded sports top. He looks around thirty-five years old, muscular and strong, good-looking, Chase might say.

The man smiles as he meets Chase's eye and it's a smile of recognition, he can see that, a smile that says "Hey, I know you"

Chase smiles back, braving it, bracing himself rather defeatedly for words of pity that he doesn't want but will take politely because that's what he does.

He stops running, out of breath, hands on his knees as he rides it out.

"Chase," he says, waving a hand in his direction as if to indicate the man to go with the name. "God, long time no see."

He's a black man with a shaved head, a sheen of sweat on his forehead from a strenuous run that Chase flickeringly envies.

"Hey," he responds, faux confident."I guess it's been awhile."

He truly does guess.

"Where've you been? We've all been wondering. There one minute, gone the next. We all speculated new woman, but - "

" - I've been around. Guess I just haven't ran into you. I've been kind of busy."

Busy recovering from the trauma this man seems oblivious to and Chase can't help but sigh with relief when he realises there will be none of the egg-shell treading there normally is when people approach the poor, brain damaged boy that stands in the place of where the man once was.

In this moment Chase thinks "Everybody lies." It's easy to let the tide take him along, no effort, no resistance. He plays the 'role' like a pro, acting a Chase he doesn't really know but it isn't so hard, isn't so hard that it throws him off.

He imagines every word as a ripple to a wave and he maintains balance like the surfer nobody knows he was.

"Jeez, Chase, you missed the tournament. You worked your ass off leading up to that and then you stopped showing up. What gives?"

"I, uh, I was out of commission for awhile."

He indicates the arm, limp in his lap - the leg, protectively cast in plastic and thrust out in front of him.

"Car accident," he lies, thankful that his cap hides the horseshoe cut in his skull. It just draws questions; looks of horror that he doesn't want. "Few weeks back. You think I look bad, you should see the state of the car."

"Aw shit, is it bad?"

"Total write off."

A smile, playful and clever.

"No, man, I mean you. Your arm. Your leg. Is it bad?"

"I needed surgery. Was in the hospital for awhile but a few months of physio and I'll be good as new."

"Guess you won't be boxing for awhile, though, huh?"

Boxing. Kickboxing. He used to do it to keep fit, to ease tension. It's not a new thing. It's not a surprise. The muscles in his arms (good or otherwise) indicate such activity and he's glad he kept it up as the years went on.

He can work with kickboxing. It's a ritual he knows well.

He looks down at his healing injuries and says: "No, I guess not."

Sad to know he may never participate again; that the very thing that eased his 'pain' as a young man grew along with him but may now be abandoned.

The jogger sits down beside him. He stretches his legs out, mimicking Chase. Looking sideways, he smiles.

"Never knew you wore glasses."

"I usually wear contacts," Chase lies, eager to avoid explanation. He takes them off and places them in his pocket. It makes the world a fuzzier place but he wants to show he's not completely weak.

"You know, when you didn't show I thought maybe the divorce wore you down. You seemed pretty low for awhile after that but, what is it you said to me? Pick up, walk on. It's all relative."

"There are more important things," Chase agrees, though he cannot imagine saying those things, cannot imagine talking to this man at all.

As he sits here beside him, however, he feels lighter than he has in weeks. Freer. Simpler.

He didn't want company but this is fine. This is…enlightening.

They talk, now, for awhile. Chase appreciates the honesty, the straightforwardness. Somewhere along the lines he establishes the man is called Anton and they've known each other for two years, ever since Anton moved from Chicago with his now-ex wife and his two daughters.

They're not close friends, per se, but they have a lot in common.

Anton labels Chase a 'difficult man to pin down' and he blames it on those harsh doctor's hours.

"Triple shifts, dude. Those'll kill you."

Chase guesses it was easier than going home to an empty house. 'Love don't live here any more…'

Anton continues.

"I don't know how many times I made you rock on your feet because you were dead to the world. I hope they're giving you time off."

"Indefinite," Chase says, and the word is an understatement.

"At least they're good for something, them and that good for nothing boss of yours."

They're good for a lot, Chase thinks, e_specially_ his 'good for nothing boss'…

He smiles, though, doesn't correct Anton on his mistake because he feels that his boss _was _good for nothing back then.

People change. In certain circumstances, people change entirely. He seems to have, going by what Anton says, and the man he 'paints' isn't the man Chase feels himself to be. He learns that he is a jazz fan and on occasion would hit the music bars after a sparring session. He would always leave before midnight, would never drink more than two and had 'a thing' with an Irish redhead named Teagan.

"She still talks about you. You really pulled her over with the smooth Australian charm. You had her convinced you were some kind of TV soap idol at first. That was the bomb."

Anton bites his lip.

"I, uh, I moved in on her once or twice. Figured you weren't coming back. It's not like the two of you were dating..."

He looks uncomfortable admitting this as if searching for Chase's approval; for his forgiveness.

Chase just smiles, unable to feel betrayed in relation to a woman he cannot picture.

"Least of my worries right now is women, Anton."

"You got that right. I was just playin' around."

His dialect is cliche. His hair, buzzed down to the scalp, gives him a streetfighting edge but Chase can see he's so much more than that even with blurred vision.

On no less than four occasions he refers to Chase as 'dude' but it doesn't matter. Chase feels an innate comfort around this man, as if his reflexes remember even if he doesn't.

He enjoys the brief glimpse into uncensored Chase...

"We have some good times, dude. It's a shame to let them go."

"Hey, I'm still here."

I'm not dead, he's saying, I was just gone for awhile. I'm not absent without leave, I was just…tied up.

"I still remember you at the club's Christmas party. You sang like a fucking angel, man, just you, Alfie's guitar and Teagen playin' groupie."

Chase laughs at that.

"Just never take me to a karaoke bar, that's all I'm saying."

"What do you mean never? I can't count on two hands the number of times you've taken ME to one."

It's harder than it seems, this treading water, this dancing waves. Chase clears his throat, wary of his mistake but thankful Anton wasn't wise to it.

Time passes quickly when there's so much to learn and all of a sudden Chase no longer values his solitude. Anton has filled it, somewhat, and there are so many places to expand to. When he checks his watch Chase feels almost sad he has to leave, so nice not to see sadness in somebody's eyes, to hear the patronising tone he is becoming accustomed to.

Anton didn't even notice anything different about him...

"Look, dude, I gotta run. Got to pick the kids up from Brianna. She gets mad if I show up late. God forbid I have a life."

Chase smiles gently. He pats Anton's leg in sympathy.

"The pitfalls if divorce and fatherhood..."

"Wouldn't change it for the world, my man. Marriage was going stale, just like yours was."

Is that what he told him? 

Is that what the truth was?

"The kids are my world, though. Wouldn't change them for the world either, even if their Mama _is_ a pain in the ass."

He holds his hand out. Chase takes it, a handshake between friends. For a second he fears doing it wrong, exposing himself as the fraud he feels, in a sense, but there is no secret society, no club, no brotherhood.

There is just friendship. .

"Come over to the club one night," Anton says. "I'm sure you'd do better than Charlie with one arm and one leg and if not you can hold up the bar until we get there."

Chase smiles softly.

"Yeah, maybe I will."

He would.

He would if he could remember where it is.

He would if he wasn't too embarrassed to ask.

He takes Anton's number stating a lost cellphone and a forgetful memory. He's not lying on either count, possibly the first truthful thing he's exchanged with this man but it doesn't matter.

All that matters is the connection he made. Re-made, even.

"I met a friend today," he tells his therapist when he braves the appointment he'd earlier put down as a definitely maybe.

"Real or imaginary?" he asks, a shrink's joke that isn't funny.

Chase just glares at him, glares at this man that simply doesn't understand him, that simly doesn't help.

His words just say everything, don't they?

"Forget it," Chase says, ably walking away from him simply because he can.

Because he doesn't need therapy when a man on the street can do a better job than any of them.


	38. Chapter 52

_Someone requested this kind of 'scene' in PM. I hope it fits what was requested._

_I'm always open for suggestion, by the way, so if there is anything you'd like to see then please let me know…_

**Part 52**

"I hear Baby Chase blew off his doctor," House says as he throws aside his cane and dumps himself into arms of leather that envelops him with such graciousness that who, indeed, needs a woman?

Chase sits on the couch, a glass of lemonade on the table in front of him and a third-eaten sandwich on a plate beside it. He's getting braver, House notes, remembers a time not so long ago when his 'politeness' was borderline fear; when he'd refrain from going near the kitchen without permission because he felt he was overstepping his mark.

He looks spoiled, in this moment, with his bottom lip protruding ever so slightly. His expression is a borderline pout.

"I don't see why I have to go. It doesn't do me any good. I wasn't going to go but I thought I'd at least show my face, y'know, to look co-operative? They're all about co-operation when it comes to me. I swear, I feel as though they're going to ground me if I even question them."

"They'd leave it up to me," House admits, though it's tongue in cheek. "I'd spank your behind and send you to bed without supper. Actually, scratch that. That'd be reward, not punishment."

"Very funny."

The truth is, he showed up because he felt he was 'ready' for them, having told House he wanted nothing more than to be alone. It was a protest on his part, the abandoning of his scheduled appointment, but that chance meeting with Anton put him in a better frame of mind. He felt ready to talk. He felt willing to co-operate, no longer felt the need to be insubordinate.

That changed the minute he sat down and began talking to that man.

He sees no benefit in speaking to a man that patronises him and indeed, a man he doesn't like nor trust.

"I've always hated shrinks. They remind me of ventriloquist's puppets, the way they nod their heads and speak without actually thinking. There's never any emotion to a shrink."

"They're all about the mind-fuck, Chase. You should know that already. You've been around them long enough."

It's true, though it's never been Chase himself that's been forced to open himself up to them. He guessed his mother was sleeping with her shrink, hated him with a vengeance because _he_ was the man of the house and this prim and prissy asshole, with his frequent home visits to his 'critical' patient, seemed intent on taking his place.

Oh, how his mother loved that idiot. How she would preen herself when she knew that he was dropping by. How eager she was to be rid of her son when 'her doctor' was scheduled to see her.

His name was Dr Naismith and, though they'd often eat jam tarts and drink tea together in the sun room, his mother never called him by his first name. For a while Chase wondered if it was some kind of forced formality, like how his dad insisted on being called 'Sir' in front of company, but that thought didn't last long.

Once, when they thought he was doing his homework, he heard her calling out his name. _Edward._

"Turn the radio off, would you, Edward? It's ruining my train of thought."

It broke a spell, in some ways, because it was all the evidence he needed, an innocent sentence but with such deeper, informal meaning.

Chase always felt like he was being analysed by the man, even though it was his mother that was the 'patient'.

"How do you feel about all of this?" he'd asked one day, not long after the incident with the lamp. Chase, his face bruised, his eye barely able to see light, painted on a fake smile .

"Never mind how I feel, Dr Naismith. How does it feel to be abusing your relationship with a woman like my mother, you sick, horny bastard?"

_Edward,_ Dr Naismith, never came by again. He passed his mother's case over to a colleague, a female.

Chase couldn't help but feel guilty when his mother sank even deeper…

"I just don't like them," he says, finally, as House unfastens his trainers and kicks them off under the table. He sighs, such an old man, cracking out his tense limbs as he attempts relaxation. It was a tough day. The patient was a three year old kid and there's never more morose and melancholy than when they're treating a child. Thank God for Cameron's career demise, he had thought, as he watched Foreman speak to the parents with the clinical detachment she lacked.

He 'treats' his own child here and now; treats him to his words and his recommendations, to his permissions and his concessions.

"If you're so _psychotheraphobic_, Chase, don't go. You only lie to them anyway. What's the point of wasting your time? Obviously, it's funny to waste _his_ time but what do _you _get out of it?"

Chase double-takes almost comically as he processes House's words.

"What – how – how would you know?"

He grows a backbone. He stiffens it.

"That's the thing with shrinks, Chase. They spend so much time trying to root deep into other people's minds that they become transparent themselves. His only daughter Monica is 22 years old. 1988 seemed like a good number to start with."

There has never been a filing cabinet that House could not access, never been a lock he couldn't bypass even without Foreman's street smarts (which in actual fact have been a disappointment ever since he hired him for them).

Chase's face is a picture as he laughs, as he shakes his head, as he tries to overcome the disbelief he's feeling.

"I can't believe you."

"Really? You really can't believe I'd do something like that?"

That stumps him. He has no response, no comeback. He simply folds his arms as if trying to keep what's left of his privacy inside, closed off and self-protective.

"You talk a lot about Mommy Chase and you avoid all issues surrounding Daddy. You lie about your capacity for remembering and you leave out the dreams entirely."

Chase visibly flinches when they are mentioned, those night terrors he tries so hard to hide, wakes up from his semi-drugged sleep with his face pressed hard into his pillow as he tries to stifle his own screams.

He doesn't remember the dreams. He just knows the terror he feels when he wakes up, as if he's been falling, falling…

"Good old Sigmund would be disappointed in you, Robbie. Dreams are the very foundation of our existence. You think I haven't heard you? It's worse than waking up to Wilson pounding the walls with Wife of the Moment."

He's trying to get a rise. All he gets is a fizzle, really. Chase's faux youth betrays him as he withdraws, as he sulks.

"I can't believe you read my files. Those are confidential, House. They're private. If I wanted you to know any of that I'd tell you."

The blush on his cheek indicates embarrassment but there is no anger in this 'betrayal'. Deep down, Chase knows the position entirely. It opens his head up a little. It lets a thought arrive without the need for pushing.

He's been here before; doesn't react in a volatile manner because he knows there's no point because anger only feeds him, only gives him fuel to the fire.

"You read every last psych report written on any of us, didn't you? We've had this conversation before. You justified it then, too, didn't you?"

_Something about 'knowing enemies as well as friends'…_

"I have to know my staff, Chase."

"Our innermost thoughts and our sexual preferences, right?"

Right. It's nothing to do with professionalism, however. House just likes to be in control.

"I can tell you that Foreman has an inferiority complex that he tries to hide with desperate need for responsibility."

"I could've told you that without reading his file…"

"And that Taub has a small penis."

Chase screws his nose up.

"I'd rather _not _know that."

"I knew of Thirteen's quasi-lesbianism before I saw it firsthand and I know that you're a compulsive liar."

"I don't lie. I just tell them what they want to hear. They haven't earned my life story and I don't see why I should tell it to them."

"Fair enough."

The agreement is as simple as that.

Fair enough.

There is quiet for a few moments, a comfortable silence between two men who are comfortable with each other. Chase looks thoughtful, as if he's contemplating what to say.

House just looks accomplished; accomplished in that he's admitted to reading Chase's innermost 'lies' and hasn't felt his wrath because of it.

That's trust.

He's always 'owned' that boy…

"You don't need to read my files," Chase says finally, when his thoughts have come into focus and he's content with the words he speaks. "If there's anything you want to know just ask me. You don't have to sneak around."

It's like opening floodgates.

It's a win for House on so many levels.

"What would I possibly want to ask a half-brain like you?" he says, though there is a smile in those words; a good-natured twang to the insult.

(*)

It's as if, through acknowledgment, he finally lets go.

Freud may well despair of Chase – but, House doesn't. House doesn't despair when the boy wakes up screaming; when he doesn't attempt to muffle it with his pillow. Floodgates open, House can attend.

He is welcome.

Like a vampire, he has been invited over the threshold of Chase's subconscious.

He doesn't despair when those figments come to ahead in Chase's mind - open, now, by House breaking that combination lock and coming clean.

"I read your mind," he might as well have said, for that's what he'll always try to do.

There is no telepathy between House and Chase but there's a deep understanding that House never anticipated before.

He staggers into Chase's room as Chase staggered into his and it's like coming full circle. It's like returning the favour.

"Chase," he says, but those wide eyes don't see him and those grasping hands are clinging to sanity as well as dear life.

"Chase, wake up. You're dreaming. You're going to wake up the neighbours. They're old. They're angry. They'll kill me before they kill you."

Chase doesn't hear the words. He just hears the fear. It's natural for a man with such a gaping hole in his thoughts to panic. The abyss is terrifying and this is pure terror.

Life is pure terror.

The dreams are representations of a thought-structure he no longer has. Memories and tensions swim through his head like long-dead spirits but none of them glue together. None of them fit.

He's haunted by things he doesn't recall and it's not fair, it's not right because, how can he process any of this without knowing what it is?

In his dream there was blood on his hands…blood on his hands, but that's all he knows. Chase isn't lying when he says he doesn't remember his dreams but sometimes, these archetypal themes strike him vividly.

He sees pictures, memories in snapshot form.

He sees a dead man, eyes open, bloated like a gutted fish...

He feels…monstrous.

"House," he chokes, when consciousness returns, when the images fall away. "I-I don't…I…"

"…shh. Be quiet. Don't make a scene."

Don't make this more than it is. Don't make it more than I can bear. But, Chase's face is red with exertion, his eyes blustering and tearful.

His breathing fails him and he tries to grasp it but he fails, he fails…

"House," he repeats, a plea, a plaintive cry. "House, I don't know what's happening."

"Nothing's happening. You were asleep and now you're awake. There's no Freddie Krueger here, Chase. I don't have knives on my fingers."

"I wake up and I can't breathe. There's blood. So much blood and I don't know what else. I don't know what else I dream but it…but it…"

…but it tears at my mind.

But it hurts me more than you can imagine.

He presses the palms of his hands into his eye sockets and he holds them there. He tries to hide, just like he tried to muffle his own cries in his pillow.

He's too proud but he needs.

He's too proud…but, he's vulnerable.

It's not a natural thing, for House to hold somebody, not like this, but there's nothing else he can do, here.

There's nothing else he can do but let Chase bury his face in his chest, hitching away those dreams with every shaking breath. So reluctant, he is, until House's arm holds him firm; until he practically forces him there.

He's not a psychologist, House, because Chase hates those, but he knows him well enough to understand that this has to be on House's terms, and so he presses Chase against him. He absorbs him, the dreams as well as the breaths.

The pain, as well as the tears.


	39. Chapter 53

_Another little mini-part in which House ponders his life gone by and Chase walks alone_

Part 53

The word sentimental never applied. He wasn't one for keeping ticket stubs or cards from St Valentine's Day. He and Stacy didn't commemorate their every meaningless milestone (first date, first kiss, first venture into the exploration of each other's bodies) but there are pictures, little flashes of evidence that they were together and they did love.

The box is unmarked. It's not sealed, not in the same way he is. It gathers dust in the bottom of his closet covered by old jackets and worn t-shirts that might turn vintage one day.

It's Chase's frightening inability to look back which inspires him to do the same as he gathers the box in both arms, heavy only with the weight of what it contains.

He places it on the bed beside him feeling there will be no sleep tonight. He's guarded and ready, listening in his own periphery for signs of distress.

There is no distress in his own journey back. As he opens that box it's like revisiting an old friend.

In a small box, green velvet and tightly sealed, his wedding ring is laid to rest. He brushes over it with his fingers feeling the softness but he doesn't exhume it. He feels it would be ungodly to drag it from it's resting place, to replace it on a finger that no longer welcomes it's meaning.

Gently, slowly, he pushes it aside, grateful for the union it represents but leaving it well alone.

There are postcards from afar. Egypt. France. London. Places he visited that left a mark on him, all with defining sentiments written in ink.

"Wish you were here, Wilson. It's Gay Pride week."

"Wouldn't you love to stick THIS where the sun don't shine?"

There are letters from his mother, from his uncle William, whose stories always stirred him as a child and young man, tales of war and conflict, of gunfire and fighting and shrapnel. Little Gregory called him William the Brave but his dad never appreciated the accolade bestowed upon a shellshocked drunk.

So many pictures, each with a story of their own. He was romantic once, a real Prince Charming.

He looks at himself wearing tight blue short, Stacy with her hair tied in a bun hanging around his neck like a star-struck teenager. Wilson took the picture. He was with a girl named Amanda at the time and this was during a weekend trip to Los Angeles. Stacy is wearing a pinafore dress that looks like a deck chair and her leg is hitched up behind her like Marilyn Monroe. House, himself, is pulling a face that a movie star might with his lip curled up to one side and his eyebrows pressed together in a frown.

Posed as they are they look so young, so in love, and House mentally notes that this is The Before and the rest of his life is Anno Domini. It's not the absence of scars on his leg that hits him but the lack of scars on his expression for this is a careless moment and that's a careless smile.

He's struck by how much Stacy loves him on these pictures, how her besotted state comes through, shines out from her eyes as the camera flashes.

Wilson's in a lot of them, he with his neatly coiffed side part and his sweater tucked into his trousers. He looks like such a boy even when he's a man, always did, always has. There's one of him leaning on a wall with his feet on show, a pair of beige chinos and some Jesus sandals completing the look. It was 1986 and he and House had hired a Winnebago and were 'road-tripping' up towards the Grand Canyon. They were going to stay overnight in the desert before hitting the Vegas slots.

Even dressed like such a preppy 'man', Wilson was still mistaken for a boy. Like Chase of today he looked younger than his years. He was thirty before they stopped asking him for ID to walk on that precious Casino floor.

More pictures - Stacy with a cushion shoved up her dress pretending to be with child. House, the loving father stroking her stomach as he gazes so lovingly into her eyes. They did it as a joke, a Polaroid picture of a milestone that never was. House wanted to send it to his parents as their 'family Christmas card', Yuletide Greetings from the son you never see and the grandchild you'll never know but he never did. There's something in the picture that saddens him when he thinks that Stacy always wanted children...

He finds his old graduation picture. He looks so square, so overly proud with his lop-sided hair and his lopsided grin, his lopsided enthusiasm and his lopsided youthful hope. House wants to take that boy and shake him.

Stop smiling. Stop hoping. Grow up. Be a man.

There's nostalgia in this, travelling back in time to a place where things were less complicated; where he was still a kid with a future and a leg that didn't hang so uselessly from his hip-joint.

He doesn't hear the door go, doesn't hear stocking-feet dragging across his wooden floor.

Chase sits down beside him and House's instinct is to shut the box back up, to seal it's contents inside like he always did.

Instead he just sits there.

"I thought you were sleeping. I crushed another dose of Ambien in your water."

"I could taste it."

"If you had any sense you'd have drank it."

That much is true. Still, what's done is done.

"So, this is you?" Chase asks. He doesn't move to touch. He doesn't reach across to place his hands on memories that are less his than his own.

House feels this is a crossroads; that he must be as open toward Chase as the young man has been toward him otherwise none of this will work, whatever this is.

"I'll give you one question, Chase. Just one. Use it wisely because you won't get another chance."

One question to 'know' the man.

One hint and query to get to the bottom of the mystery that is Gregory House.

Choose wisely, he says, as if he were the Dungeon Master and Chase his prey; as if the answer to his very question will mean the difference between life and death; will be the opening of the very universe, in fact.

Chase could ask about life. Love. He could ask about likes and dislikes. He could ask about hopes and dreams, about meaning. Morals and qualms.

He could ask about sex.

Instead, he asks the one thing that's been burning a hole in him deeper than the one that is already there.

"Why are you doing this for me?" he asks. He looks genuinely bewildered when he asks: "Why do you care?"

What makes me so special? What makes me so good that you'll break down your walls for me?

House senses his need to ask. He feels his need to search and to seek. To know, even.

It's a searching question. It has a deeper meaning that only House can understand and it changes everything. Why him? Why Chase? Why Chase when he cared so little about Foreman?

Why Chase when it's not so long ago that he was trying to kill him, not save him?

The answer to this question is something even House isn't ready to consider.

House's face becomes a mask as he says "ask me something else."

(*)

He feels something when he comes through the doors, when House drops him off outside and tells him to call a cab to take him home. Don't walk, he says. Your physio's going well but you're not ready to do long distance.

"Trust me," he had said, indicating his own withered limb, "Daddy pushed too hard, too. It only made matters worse."

With his 'one question', Chase had asked the background of the limp, the full story behind the need for the cane, the constant pain, the unfairness of it all…

House had responded in pictures.

"This is Stacy," he'd said. "You might meet her around the hospital some time."

This is Stacy, he'd said, the woman I loved, and she made a decision that changed my life…

Chase thinks that House's decision to 'take him in' has changed his life, a life that was so full of uncertainty before, but he won't ask that question again, not when it was met with those shutters visibly pulling themselves down right before his eyes.

This room was a part of his life once and the scent of its walls brings feelings gushing back. His muscles instantly relax as he falls back into that meditative pattern, as the whiteness of this place envelops him.

He's early. He doesn't want to go any further in case he becomes beleaguered. He hangs around in the waiting area just taking in everything that he should know but doesn't.

It reminds him of House's box, full of notices, certificates, postcards and pictures. There's a picture of him on the wall, a group shot, and underneath the words "New Orleans 2008" are etched in gold, raised letters. He's struck by how happy he looks, how at ease, with his long, blond hair and his bright, lucid eyes.

That was him. That was Chase. What is he now? Can he even justify calling himself that?

He catches a glimpse of his present self in the mirrored wall and it saddens him to see the difference. Thinner. Paler. Hair still covered by a hat he won't remove and a look that spells bird-like confusion and displacement.

He sees a broken twig-like boy that doesn't shine like the man in the picture. This is before and after and, how can he compete with what he was?

For a moment he's overwhelmed, just as he knew he'd be. For a moment he wants to pull out the cellphone he still can't use and call House to turn right back around and pick him up.

Then it all changes.

"Hey, you made it," Anton says, genuinely glad to see him. Chase had been so wrapped up he didn't even hear him coming.

The handshake remains the same, neutral and straightforward.

It defines Anton in a lot of ways.

"Why don't I take your coat and put it out of the way? You remember how hot it gets in here when we all get pumped."

Chase smiles. He does remember that.

"Yeah, I remember. Place smells like the changing room after footy."

He remembers the scent of pure masculinity, of musk, of heat, of tension, of testosterone…

He remembers the noise, the sound of bare feet on mats, of practice matches in that soft, blue ring.

It's all good.

"Hey, lose the hat, dude," Anton says with a smile and, before Chase can protest it's been stolen from him, that protective barrier removed, the shroud stolen from him before he was ready to let it go.

He panics.

"I – " he begins, pulling back before the damage can be done but then there's no point.

There it is. The curtain is up. The stage is on full show.

There it is, for all the world and its mother to see and, as good a guy as Anton is he can't hide the way his eyes open wider, the way they magnetise towards that patchwork skull.

Chase is struck dumb. Motionless. It's like the band-aid has been torn off and he's left in shock at the sudden, searing pain that shoots through him. He feels trapped, wants to cry, wants to scream, wants to run…

Then, Anton breaks that feeling with a hand on his shoulder, with an eye-to-eye look that says "This changes nothing."

Chase feels he should explain himself but he simply can't find the words. He just feels the tension building behind his eyes and he closes them to try to stop the onslaught.

The silence doesn't last long. Anton breaks it with such subtle perfection, with such tolerant charm that Chase feels he couldn't have found a better friend.

"You need to sue your hairdresser, man," he jokes, though his voice is thick and shaky and his smile isn't quite what it was. "The chicks all dug your halo. Now they'll dig your scar."

It's what he needed, someone to brush over it, someone to attempt to make a joke.

It's what he wanted – someone to simply nod, accept and move on.

"Come on," Anton says, "we've got time for a quick drink before we get started. You know how I like to get here early and chill out for awhile…"

Yeah, Chase thinks, surprised at himself.

Yeah, he knew that.

That's why he got there early, too.

(TBC)


	40. Chapter 54

_In which Chase hears something he doesn't really want to hear and flees…_

**Chapter 54**

He feels Anton must know that he lied. He felt his performance was adequate but perhaps that wasn't the case.

He's seen the scar. To Chase, that means he's seen inside of him. He's lifted the hatch and saw the contents of his empty head. It scares him to know that. It scares him to know that people can look at him and see something they don't understand, that they can reach a conclusion and stick with it.

He's not a thing to be looked at, to be pondered, to be pitied.

He's not a thing at all…

Chase wonders if he can keep up the act. He wonders if Anton will call him upon it. The other man runs a hand over his own head as if he's trying to maintain it's intact. He senses Chase's embarrassment, notes how he hasn't looked him in the eye since he saw.

He also sensed that Chase preferred to be 'away' from the action; preferred to watch through the window because he didn't feel comfortable with everybody looking at him.

"So, you got hurt," Anton says, taking a sip from his beer. "I got hurt once, too. It's no big deal. It doesn't change you as a person."

"No? Everyone else seems to think so. I'm not Chase any more. I'm hurt little boy that needs constant supervision."

"Yeah, well, you know what I say? Fuck 'em. You're no less of a man because you got your head caved in."

The words are crude. It doesn't make them any less true. It's Layman's Terms but a depressed skull fracture is indeed what one might refer to as 'caving in'.

Anton shrugs his shoulders.

"You're no different."

That's the thing, though. That's the awful thing. Chase _has_ changed. Chase_ is_ less of a man. This is not the same man that stands before Anton as the man he was before.

He doesn't say a word. He stares out of the window into the training room. There are six men stood in a line. Chase knows them all but remembers none of them. They look strong. They look resilient. They're kicking with their legs straight, their hands pulled in tight to their chest.

Chase can't imagine he ever looked tough doing this, not with his golden halo, not with his pretty-boy face. He favoured Tai Chi before he got into combat. It was peaceful. Calming.

The boxing was just a tension thing…

"It'll be awhile before I can do that again," he admits, nodding his head toward those 'fighters' – men who are bouncing on their heels, shirtless, limitless.

"No rush, man."

"I don't even remember the basic moves, Anton."

He looks up. He makes a confession.

"I don't remember this. I don't remember you. I just…fake it well."

Anton smiles. He suppresses a laugh because he feels that would be too much. They're comfortable in this place. It's 'their' place, or it was, and he doesn't want to ruin anything. It's a family, this club. People come and go but nobody ever forgets. Prodigal sons and daughters are always welcomed back as if they never left at all.

He pats Chase's hand.

"You didn't fake it. Not so well, man. For one thing, you got the handshake wrong. I changed it so you didn't feel bad. I didn't want to call you on it."

"You knew?"

"Suspected. There's a subtle difference. Didn't want to embarrass you, dude. I figured you'd tell me in your own time that something wasn't right."

"I didn't want to tell you at all."

He has an air of Foreman, Chase thinks. He has an air of Foreman if Foreman didn't act the tough guy all the time.

Chase has never acted the tough guy but he is tough. He's tougher now than he's ever been.

Anton sees his vulnerability, though, and it's new. He sees how uncomfortable it makes him to appear weak; to appear broken.

"Look, I was in a car accident when I was seven," he admits. "Split liver. Bleeding out. They gave me a slim chance of survival, told my Ma to start arranging for a casket."

He sits up straight as if displaying himself. Hands down his chest, this is pride. He's proud of his body. He's proud of his strength.

He's proud to be alive – just like Chase should be.

"Look at me now, man."

Look at me now, a grown man, a father, an ex-husband. Look at me now, living, breathing, surviving…

He lifts up his shirt. Chase has seen the mark before. He's commented upon the neatness of the patch-up job. He's analysed professionally, marvelling at how the scar 'grew' with the man, how even after all these years you can see the tiny pinpricks where the needles went in to sew it all together.

He stares now, stares at the scar that covers muscle.

"You see? Open fucking surgery. Anyone asks? I tell 'em I got stuck. I told _you_ I got stuck. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Because fuck 'em, that's why. It doesn't matter how we get hurt. We're only human. Humans all lie. We're all just piss, wind and bravado."

_Everybody lies. _

"I'm not lying now because I don't need to lie. And, neither do you. We're friends, man. There's no shame in getting hurt."

There's no shame in being susceptible.

"Thanks," Chase says, and it's in this moment that Anton sees the difference. He sees a flash, a glimmer, an 'imprint' of the Chase he once was. He sees it from behind this young man's eyes, less confident than they were before – younger, somehow.

"For what? What are you thanking me for?"

"For being a good friend. I wish more people could be this candid. I don't even remember the last time I had such an honest talk outside of my usual routine."

He's not exaggerating.

He literally doesn't remember.

Even House treads on thin ice, at times…

(*)

It's playing on House's mind. It's been playing on his mind since Chase asked him that one question…

Why me? Why are you doing this for me? Why are you giving me all of this?

Wilson tells him "Don't go there," tells him "Karamel was a stupid mistake."

"Yeah. Of course she was. That's what I'd have written on Chase's epitaph. Karamel was a stupid mistake. God, he asked me today why I kept him around. He asked me why I made such effort keeping him alive and well and what he'd done to deserve that. What did he do to deserve an overnight hospital stay and a closed-off airway?"

His boyish friend tells him to hold back, don't spoil this. Keep quiet, don't ruin the fragile bond he's built. He's the magazine agony aunt; the Sally Jessy Raphael of this world.

He's the one that talks sense.

"You were out of your mind, House," he says. "Your memories of that time are warped at best."

"Not so warped that I don't remember them."

"Has it ever occurred to you that it simply slipped your mind? Foreman knew he was allergic, too. I didn't see him jumping in to stop him?"

"Yeah, that's because it'd be one rival down."

House tries to explain his need as he sits on Wilson's couch, his feet kicked up over the arm because he knows his friend can't handle the mess. He's already left his shoes in the hallway, his coat on the floor, two empty beer bottles on the floor…

"I can't sleep. You know I love my sleep, Wilson. Every time I close my eyes I imagine what might've happened. I see him with blue lips and a kangaroo in his casket. It'd be funny if it wasn't so close to the truth."

Every time Chase closes his eyes he is haunted by a culling he doesn't even recall. House understands. House understands because he feels it, too.

He's haunted by what Chase did. He's haunted by what he did, too.

Wilson sits down beside him.

"Look, House. You weren't yourself. You never wanted to kill Chase. You have this guilt complex that's totally disproportionate to the actual event."

"Disproportionate? Right. Because he didn't choke to death? That was pure luck, Wilson."

"It was me that called her. I guess I'm accessory to attempted murder?"

"I told you to hire her."

"That doesn't mean you wanted him dead. God, House, you sent me to that restaurant on Elmwood Street last summer and I ended up with food poisoning from the roasted salmon. Were you trying to kill me, too?"

"Quite possibly."

It's not entirely true.

Wilson's death was never first and foremost in 'Amber's' mind.

There's no real reason why Chase's was.

"Look, if you tell him you're just going to open a whole can of worms that, knowing you, will grow tongues and turn into snakes. Do you really want that?"

Does he?

"You always ruin good things. The minute things settle down you always try to throw a spanner into the works. You do it with me. You do it with everyone. This is a confused kid, though. Why do you want to do it with him?"

Maybe he craves the chaos.

(*)

"I gave you one question, last night," House says, as Chase returns home from his evening. He looks happy. Calm.

It's not an act of cruelty for House to ruin that. It's an act of necessity. Chase wants honesty. He says it so often.

He wants honesty – good or bad.

"I'm going to give you an answer."

"You are?"

"At your bachelor party," he says, "I tried to kill you."

"That's…hardly an answer, House, but okay. Gun? Knife? Poisoned arrow?"

He's smiling. He's not taking this seriously, that much is clear. He limps to the couch and sits down. It's an act of comfort when he picks up a cushion; when he places his arm upon it.

House strokes the bowl on the table. Four apples, two bananas – and a handful of strawberries. He watches as Chase's eyes flicker towards those small, red fruits, knowing that just one touch to his lips would send his body into a shock so severe he might never recover from it.

"I knew you were allergic."

"It's no secret…"

"Foreman brought breakfast one morning. Bagels and milkshakes. They were all strawberry. You looked like a kid that got coal for Christmas instead of gift-wrapped Legos. He thought you were being an ungrateful brat. You offered to drink the shake but told him he'd need a crash cart on standby."

"I've been known to go into respiratory arrest because of a flavoured lipgloss."

Poor Anne. Poor Anne didn't know what hit her when she kissed him so softly, so sweetly – when she ended up in a hospital waiting room on their six month anniversary waiting for the doctors to tell her he was breathing on his own again.

"Lipgloss," House says. "Milkshake. Body butter…"

"You tried to kill me with body butter?"

He looks incredulous. He thinks it's a joke but it isn't. It's never been a joke. During that time nothing was. Nothing was funny. Nothing was real but Amber's words, Amber's words which reflected his own because she was he and he was she.

"I knew you were allergic and I hired her anyway. Strawberry body butter was her party piece. Her name was Karamel. Her body was a temple and she poisoned you like snake venom in Roman wine."

The nerves set in. House watches them fall over Chase like a cloak, a shroud, watches them tighten as he attempts to clear his throat.

He swallows hard as if it's difficult.

"It was an accident, surely."

House's stare is intense. He doesn't falter. He doesn't understand what he'll gain from this. He doesn't know what he'll get out of this moment of reflection.

He watches as Chase's arm falls away from the comfort of that cushion, as his arm wraps around himself .

"I knew you'd go into shock. It wasn't a conscious thing but…I knew. Deep down, I knew."

"But, you didn't know I'd lick her."

"Of course you would. It was your party, Chase. I organised it. It was your party and I tried to ruin it."

He pauses before saying "I tried to ruin you."

He's not treading ice. Chase ought to be grateful but he's just baffled.

"But, why?"

"Because I wanted to build something beautiful and then tear it down? I organised that party. Why does a madman do what he does, Chase?"

"A…madman? House, I don't understand."

He sounds afraid, now. He looks frightened and whether it's intentional or not, he's backed himself as far away as possible. He's the fly that's trying to avoid the web. House is the spider.

Chase keeps sight of the door in case he needs to escape and it's disheartening, in a sense.

House wants to shake him for it; shake the fear out of him. He wants to shake the fear out of himself.

"I was ill, Chase. Maybe I wanted to create chaos. I don't know."

"Then why tell me? Why tell me this terrible thing if you don't even know the reason it happened?"

He looks accusingly at House as he says "How does this answer my question?"

"I don't know. You were so eager to know why I was willing to take care of you but I felt you needed to know that it wasn't always my intention. I thought you had a right to know what kind of man you're putting your faith in."

A would-be killer. A murderous man who picks the wings of dragonflies; who traps birds in nets and clips their wings.

"I don't know why I did it, Chase. I guess it's just one of life's greatest mysteries."

He doesn't know - but it might go a fair way to explain why he was so eager to save him; why he is so determined to make his life worthwhile.

Because he tried to take it, once.

Because he tried to end it.

"I need to go," Chase says, his eyes wide, his voice cracking. "This is just…this is just too fucked up."

To hear that a man tried to kill him. To hear that a man tried to kill him and that's why he wants to save him, now.

To hear that House's good deeds all stem from a need to atone.

He stands up. He sways a little, the shock getting to him. He looks unsteady. He looks dangerously pale. House wonders if he's going to pass out.

Why did he do this again? 

Why did he come clean?

"Look, Chase. I just thought you deserved to know. Good and bad, you told me. Good and bad, as long as it's the truth. Well, that's the truth."

"I don't believe this. Things were going so good tonight. So good, and_ you_…"

The 'you' is accusatory. He's ruined something beautiful, again.

"I what? I was honest. I answered your question."

Chase shakes his head. Shaky. Desperate.

"No, you _didn't."_

"I'm good to you because I wasn't always. I take care of you because I owe you. I'm in your debt. I'm your humble slave."

"So, it's obligation?"

It comes out wrong. Chase doesn't want obligation.

He also doesn't want to be near a man that wanted to hurt him…

"I have to go, House. I just…"

…he just has to leave.

His head is spinning. Panic. Breathlessness. His lungs aren't good for this. His body, it's too weak. He stumbles against the wall and House's stomach clenches.

"Chase, wait."

"I have to go."

Chase is as much of a cripple as House is.

It's adrenaline that makes him 'run' faster, though and in this moment House curses his own stupidity not in telling the boy…but, in telling him when he's not lashed to his bed by leaden limbs, restrained by sleeping potions, by the equipment for his long-term IV meds.

He curses himself for making this revelation when he's free and mobile and able to run away.

Chase leans against the wall when he can't run any more. The air is so cold he can see his breath as it pants, as it suffers.

It's only when he comes to his senses that he realises he doesn't know where to go…


	41. Chapter 55

…_inspired by Cajun Shadeaux. Hope I do not disappoint, my dear…_

_**Warning – recreational drug use***_

**Part 55**

Five minutes.

He wonders if this is what he wanted, this silence, this solitude.

The apartment is empty, now, a Kingdom of One with a singular flag that hangs on an invisible pole. It's just as it always was B.C (Before Chase) when House enjoyed the lack of need, of judgment; when he thrived on the ability to simply come home and crash out without the need to explain himself.

This was his private place and only the privileged made it past the boundary of his wooden door frame…

House dry-swallows three Vicodin and relishes the chalk-taste on the back of his throat. He enjoys the pressure of those capsules disappearing down his oesophagus and into his welcoming stomach. He need not hide behind the fridge door to avoid Chase's questions, need not cut down his usual dose to avoid being labelled 'pharmaceutically abusive'.

Still, he can't silence the voice that whispers beneath its breath.

"_You did this." "You caused this." "You poison everything you touch."_

"This is me," he says aloud and, though there is nobody there he opens his palms in that quiet gesture of absolute truth. "Take me as I am."

I am what I am, he says. Don't try to change me.

Ten minutes.

He sits back, kicks back. He pretends to be unaffected by the evening's events but even without moving he can feel the tachycardia, the elevated temperature, the heat in his face that indicates stress. Automatically, he diagnoses himself. He places a label on the difficult breaths and the sinking sensation, the heat and the trembles that jolt through his body. Anxiety, this is, intensified by hypersensitivity. He tries to ignore the fact he can hear every single passing car, his hearing heightened like a new mother alert to every last breath and every last sigh.

He hears footsteps outside and his heart leaps up into his throat as it chokes him, as it steals his breath. He looks for the shadow of a figure beneath the door. He waits for a key to enter a lock, for the door to open and for the sheepish, tentative young man to come through that door. He waits for him to emerge with his head bowed and his voice quiet begging House for forgiveness for running away.

"_Tick tock. Tick tock."_

Ten minutes turn to twenty. To thirty.

House tries to pretend that it's a weight off his shoulders when Chase doesn't materialise.

(*)

Sixty-five minutes.

The 'truth' is, Chase was a hindering influence in his free-spirited life.

House has always been good at lying to himself and as he lies back with the TV remote in his hand he's positively deceitful.

He lies to himself when he says that none of this is his fault, that Chase couldn't handle a truth that may well have been difficult to swallow yet was the truth absolute.

The truth, indeed, is that House, in a moment of madness, had tried to end his life.

Back then, before his time at Mayfield, Freud would've used him as a case study. House might've been Subject A, a man with a misfiring internal structure whose base desires, murderous and others, were voiced by a woman whose death he feels responsible for. In life Amber had been a cut throat bitch. In death she was something worse.

An enabler.

A murderous outlet.

Amber, it seems, was House's uncontrollable 'Id', that drive, that urge, that unrestrained, unbridled 'thing' that we all have within us. Cameron might've been his Superego, his moral, restraining voice – yet, Cameron was silent and Amber ran wild.

House had no ego at that time. Maybe his ego is Chase, now, but that's another matter entirely. Back then things were different. Back then the boy was simply minion and duckling. Back then House had no control of his mind and his actions.

House had an appetite for destruction and, far be it for him to see the happiness of another man, he couldn't help but to try to destroy. Perhaps he felt that Chase would leave him, that he would grow and excel, an intelligent, handsome, successful man with two legs and a beautiful wife, a man who overcame his difficult youth and made something of himself.

Perhaps he felt that Chase was 'moving on', a young man that Wilson oft referred to as 'Junior' and who House could well see succeeding him. Did Chase have the audacity to change, to pull free of House's puppet master's strings? Did he dare to walk alone?

Perhaps there's no reason at all for House's behaviour, that he truly was out of his mind.

He's out of his mind now, pulled close to breaking point by worry and concern he fights tooth and nail to hide.

Repression has always been his strong point, though, suffocating his own humanity with layer upon layer of denial.

He swallows another Vicodin, waits for the chemical calm.

He wonders, absently, if Amber would be laughing as she pictured Chase on a street corner, stubborn and childish and freezing to death?

(*)

Minutes pass by like hours, tiny passages of time spreading out for miles and miles as Chase walks through these bitter, icy streets. The days are warm but the nights seem cold.

Chase doesn't feel he could be warm in this moment, frightened and alone, reminiscent of the days he ran away from home as a boy in the hope that someone would care enough to come looking. He had passive-aggressive tendencies. His father called him selfish but he was anything but. He was scared and insecure, a little boy grown up too fast who had seen bad in the world before his time. By the age of ten he'd learned that he could rely only upon himself and that anybody else was secondary, mere passing ships in an achingly dark night.

It's dark tonight. As Chase looks up he could count every star. In this moment he wishes he were in Australia where he was never cold, where he was never alone, even when he was, because Australia was mother, father, brother and sister to his world and he always felt at peace when he was lying beneath 'her' sky.

He doesn't want to go back there, not to House, and it's a sucker punch to his gut whenever he thinks of that man's name. How could he do that? How could he say that?

How could the only man he's trusted in as far as he can remember come clean with a confession so awful, so damning and so ultimate that Chase will never trust him again?

The words don't seem real.

_I tried to kill you. _

They don't seem tangible. He cannot grasp them. He is numbed by them as he is numbed by the cold, numbed by their structure, numbed by their meaning.

Chase's life is like a never-ending abyss, a universe of thick, black sky. House was a guiding star, a little shred of light that showed him the way and led him to the safe place he cannot find alone.

The only thing he can think is "What now?"

(*)

"Would you mind if I, uh…if I crashed here for the night? I hate to intrude and I know you've got your own problems but…please."

Please, he says, with blue lips and a pale face and eyes ringed red and watering from the wind. He shivers in a dark-wood doorway, his whole body leaning against the frame where it can barely support itself. His arm is throbbing from fingers to neck and his leg no longer feels a part of him. His crutches are his saviour but they feel heavy as lead as his anaesthetised fingers drop them carelessly to the ground.

He doesn't stumble, he's strong.

He doesn't fall…but, he sways.

The man is a virtual stranger but Chase had nowhere else to go. Anton steps aside, signals for Chase to get in out of the cold. He's wearing a wife-beater and a pair of black sweats and the look in his eyes implies he's been sleeping.

"I have a pull out bed in the spare room," he says. "The kids usually sleep in there so it's a bit of a mess but…Jesus, what happened?"

He watches as Chase begins to topple, as the energy drains from him like a hole in a balloon. He watches as his face curls up in discomfort and catches him before he hits the ground entirely.

"Sorry," Chase says, softly, "Sorry, I'm okay."

"You don't look okay. Shit, are you sure you should be on your feet? Do you need me to call someone?"

"NO," Chase calls out, a little too loudly. "I-I mean, no. I'm fine. I just…I just need to get off my feet."

It's as if Chase's body finally gives up now that it's found somewhere to be. He manages to make it to the couch before collapsing in exhaustion, as the adrenaline wears thin and his system begins to crash on him.

"You wanna tell me what's wrong?"

"Bad night," Chase says, closing his eyes against a wave of sudden nausea. "Just…a really, really bad night."

Calm now, Anton cracks open a beer and hands it to Chase, its contents fizzing up over the top of the bottle.

He doesn't feel it as it washes over his hands…doesn't feel anything at all.

"You want to talk about it? I'm no Jerry fuckin' Springer but people tell me I'm a half-decent listener."

"Nothing to say. Just…people not being what I think they are. I don't trust easily, Anton, and when people lose my trust then there's rarely a way back."

He sighs.

"I don't know much, right now, but I know that part of me hasn't changed."

Anton gets that. Nodding his head he leans back on the couch.

"Know how you feel, dude. Seriously."

The truth is, his head has been aching with the pressure of his divorce, with the paperwork and the custody arguments, with the subtle lies and the accusations his wife has been throwing at him.

"This damn divorce. I haven't been sleeping."

He sounds jaded. He sounds almost as exhausted as Chase does, his voice a drawl, his eyes heavy beneath their lids.

"I'm so sorry," Chase says, softly. "I woke you up."

"Nah…"

"I just…I had nowhere else to go. I'd have ended up in some rehab facility or, worse still, back where I came from. I just needed to get away from all of that. I'm tired of it. I just needed to run."

To escape.

To flee.

"I understand entirely. There's nothing to be sorry for, man. You didn't wake me, I promise."

He hasn't been sleeping. That distinctive smell that comes from his dining room isn't home cooking, might go a long way to explaining his bloodshot eyes and his drawling voice.

"You need to take it down a notch," Anton says. "The beer's a start."

Chase looks down at the drink in his hand, barely even conscious of the fact it had been placed there. He looks confused as he turns the bottle around, as he examines its contents and its colours, its potency behind the glass.

"I'm not meant to," he says quietly.

"I promise I won't tell anyone," Anton replies, the voice of indulgence where Chase has heard only restraint before.

He's not supposed to drink, he knows that. He also knows that House isn't supposed to make an attempt on his life, no matter how out of his mind he was at the time of it occurring so who gives a damn about consequences?

There is no right and wrong when these things come to light.

"Ah, I could do with something stronger," he sighs as he puts the bottle to his lips. "This is good but my head's full of madness and it's driving me crazy."

Chase just isn't thinking straight.

He isn't thinking at all.

"I have a joint if you want to share," Anton says, finally. His voice is cautious, a small sound, mistrustful and edgy, at first.

Chase turns his head to the side and looks at his friend, though there is no judgment there. There is no condemnation.

"It's not something I do regularly but it helps. It helps take the edge off. It helps make things focus themselves. It puts a whole lot of shit into perspective, Chase, and that's the truth."

It's medication, in a sense. House has prescribed it to patients in small, secret doses to ease their pain.

If anyone needs to ease their pain, in this moment it's Chase. He's young and reckless, damaged and scared witless.

One might say that Anton is his own 'id' in this moment as he hands over that white paper stick with the bright Amber flame on the end.


	42. Chapter 56

_I return with a new chapter. I actually wrote this on an iPod over a week in Spain so I hope it's not too crappy. I've kind of messed around with it since I got back, format, etc, and it's ready for posting now. _

_Thanks to Cajun Shadeaux for her little idea. I hope I have not ruined it. And, for those of you who are still 'with me', drop me a little line. I love to hear ideas and the like and it does help me write faster when I know that people are still around. _

_Hope you are well. _

**Chapter 56**

The sensation is a pleasant one, the mind becoming a fuzzy hive of activity so dim and so dulled it plays down the suggestion of pain that pushes behind his eyes. He imagines there are blankets behind his sockets that cushion everything that threatens him, sponges which soak up each and every harmful thought or flash.

It's a Heaven of sorts in Chase's head; a Heaven or warmth, of tranquillity, of safety from a man he began to look upon with such wondrous trust and yet who inevitably wanted him aborted from this world just as he imagines Rowan Chase did when he was little more than a blip on a screen; a line on a test that his mother had taken.

He feels a pulse so strong it makes him sweat, his face heated, his body clammy and slick. There is a red mark on the wall, one he finds fascinating with unfocused blue eyes scouring upon it. There are red marks on his cheeks too, clammy and fever bright. He likens himself to that very wall, strong an impenetrable. The thought makes him smile. He smiles at Anton, who calls him a lightweight in a playful, fraternal tone that he's never known. He wraps an arm around his shoulders as he nudges him.

"You feel a little calmer now? I read once that weed can help with tension headaches. You get those?"

Chase breathes out an affirmation as he sinks back into the couch. Nothing matters. There are no words. Anton notes with gratitude that he isn't shaking with rage any more, that he is placid and even tempered. He'd never seen Chase so anxious, so expressive. He's never seen him so worked up, even after those long, hard shifts, even after he's lost patients…

Anton knows how it is to be stressed to the point of mindlessness; to be agitated to such a degree that nothing makes sense any more.

He found his own cure, legal or illegal it doesn't matter. Land grown, this is no poison.

"Just let it all wash over you, man. This used to be medicine. You should know. Still prescribed, I do believe. Life, Chase? None of it's worth getting maddened over. Trust me."

Trust me, he says, as he contemplates the meaninglessness of everyday problems, as he washes them down with a mouthful of beer and a head full of cotton candy.

"Not worth it."

Not threatened death. Not a childless future. It all seems so trivial now. They sit quietly, each reflecting upon the meaning of their existences but none of it seems important in this moment. There are no issues, not here, not now. For a long while, things are just pleasantly devoid. They enjoy the warmth of companionship and the knowledge that, despite everything, they are not alone in the world.

It's when Chase starts to lose consciousness that things become a problem. He didn't indulge much but it was enough, enough to start murmuring in confusion, enough to start feeling as if he's far, far away. He did this a few times in college, experimented that first time when he felt God leave him after seminary school. He likened it to incense only there was clarity in this where he felt no clarity in the scriptures. It made him feel slightly dim, a little bit soft around the edges but never like this.

He places his hands to his temples and makes a quiet, wordless sound. It isn't pain. It's the expression of a man that knows he has done wrong.

_Oh…_

The drug depresses his nervous system. His perception becomes altered, his concentration severely compromised. His reflexes become dulled and his coordination, already deteriorated, renders him barely capable of movement.

A little voice in the back of his head tells him his situation is becoming critical when he begins to see lights; to hear sounds that aren't there. Still he smiles, his ability to react to alarm no longer in existence, buried under rocks. Stoned, like he once was.

_There's something…wrong._

It would terrify House how fast Chase gets into trouble without supervision. One little lapse. One little moment of effervescent stupidity. One little burnout. If Chase could speak he might casually tell Anton to call an ambulance because he can feel himself waning, can feel the brachycardia setting in as his blood pressure drops dangerously low.

_Something really, really wrong…_

He feels the world yawn around him, a huge, gaping mouth swallowing him down. It's only when his arm jerks that Anton notices. Neurological dysfunction, Chase thinks. Seizure activity.

_Shit._

He makes a sound that could be perceived as a whimper. A choke. It grasps Anton's attention, reaches him through the haze.

"Hey, Chase, you don't look so hot, kid, are you alright?"

Flashing images cross before his eyes then disappear into nothingness. He cannot hold onto them. He cannot hold onto anything. He cannot hold himself up, falls forward with a jerky, staccato stumble.

"Jesus, dude, what's wrong with you?"

He's a little boy again and he wants his Grandma, calls for her aloud in sounds that don't form her name. He calls for House against his judgement.

He tries to reach for Anton but his arms just fall away.

"Chase?" he hears in the periphery of his fading consciousness.

All he can think is: "_I'm gone…I'm gone…"_

(*)

They find him discarded on the ground like an old sports bag, ragged and unloved. Whoever left him wanted him to be found but didn't want to answer any questions. They wrapped him up in a blue woolen blanket and the indication is that they cared, at least.

He isn't hurt, isn't bleeding. There are no obvious signs of injury but he's seizing intermittently and he's cold, terribly cold. His GCS on arrival is a lowly 5 rising to 8 prior to sedation for scanning purposes. He is physically responsive if not verbally, localising to stimulation and discomfort, when applied. His limbs move but not on command.

Cuddy calls his name but he does not answer.

They see irregularities in the scans, nothing severe but necessitating caution. They fight to prevent secondary brain injury, to keep him safe, to keep him quiet. It's what's in his blood that troubles them, though, a moral question for those in health, a severe lapse for a man with problems such as Chase's. Perhaps he had forgotten himself. Perhaps he was immature.

Perhaps he gave in to peer pressure, the person that left him here too embarrassed to be seen with the consequence of his stupidity. Perhaps the personification of Chase's bad influence has a record, was wary of questions that would need to be asked.

They don't know the truth of it, that Anton feared for his children should their father be caught in possession. Would it work against him? His wife would say so. An unfit father, she would say, not quite realising that she drove him to this. They'd look at his record and agree with her, forgetting the fact that he's trying to be a good dad to his kids, that he's got away from those that sought to do bad things with him.

They'd only see it in black and white, that Anton is a bad man, a criminal – a man that relies upon drugs in order to get through the day.

He sits at home biting his nails, hating himself for what he has done. He thought he was being a friend. A pal.

He thought he was helping but then the kid started shaking like that...

The hospital call House who behaves indifferently to the situation yet whose pauseless 'run' to neuro ICU is indicative of his unvoiced concern. He finds Chase achingly still, eyes closed, body immobilised by thick leather straps. Six seizures, they say, or six that they know of. None since they doped him up, since they took control.

It seems like a metaphor, an indication of what he needs. To be doped up. To be controlled.

_Idiot kid. Stupid, ridiculous boy._

"He hasn't regained consciousness?"

"They're snowing him to be on the safe side," Foreman says. "There were some irregularities with the tests. His neurological status is unstable because of the effects of the drugs on his CNS. He went into shutdown. We just have to keep him quiet until it's out of his system. Any seizures could have an adverse affect, as you well know."

"Of course. I'm not stupid."

Cuddy is more blunt with House, her words lacking the sensitivity of Foreman's. She bites down on his jugular. She tosses her head around for good measure. House likens her to a pitbull, digging deep, never letting go.

"He's been smoking marajuana, House. Drugs. In his state. When did Chase do drugs and why didn't you stop him?"

"Hardly drugs," House says under his breath. "Hardly anything you haven't done yourself, Miss Moral Compass."

"You're playing this down? He is your responsibility, House. Need I remind you he was near death when you pulled him from the ground?"

"And, need I remind _**you**_ that you wanted me to leave him down there?"

She is momentarily silent. Stunned. It's a physical act, her pulling herself together. She yanks down her suit jacket and stands firm.

"This isn't some game, House. He needs your guidance."

He always did, Cuddy thinks, noting how Chase so often acted to win House's approval where he failed to win his father's.

Her tone is questioning. It asks, "How could you?"

How could you let him do this, asks Mother of the Year.

House resents the implication that she could do better but instead of confronting her on the issue he chooses to walk away.

"He needs better than this, House," she calls out after him. Her words, as well as her tone, are like arrows in his back. Piercing. Each one hitting the target.

He _does_ need better than this.

(*)

They put him into a barbiturate coma to keep the seizures away. It's not ideal but there is no ideal. They do this as they question House at every turn.

As they hook up his ventilator they steal House's breath with their accusations.

"You didn't protect him enough."

They protect his airway. They administer severe drugs to try to protect his living, his breathing.

"He was well aware of his limitations. I would imagine you drummed this into him? He needed to hear it."

Again, there is resentment. Again, House wants to take their words and pierce them.

"Yeah, every day I told him what he couldn't do. Every day I told him how helpless he was. It's an excellent technique. It gives him a _fantastic_ sense of despondency."

"He needs realism. His condition isn't going to change overnight. He needs someone to keep him in line when he starts getting out of control with it. He needs a firm hand."

"So, let me get this straight. You want me to beat him into submission? He had a _head _injury."

"Exactly, which is why you might want to reel him in metaphorically when he gets over-confident."

House argues that his influence is limited; that he has no right to force Chase into personal choices he does not agree with. Right now, in his incapacitated state, he could make his medical choices but what else?

"I couldn't keep him against his will. I threaten to tie him down and forcefeed him but he threatened to have me arrested for false imprisonment. He deserves to have a life. I trusted he could make his own mistakes and learn from them."

"This was one hell of a mistake, House. He's back in ICU."

" - as a precaution. He'll be stable by morning. Don't make this worse than it is. He'll be fine."

"You hope."

House lets that one go. He doesn't drop everything, however. Not when they're digging deep. Not when they're festering inside of him just because they can.

"The fact is you should've been monitoring him more closely."

Should've. Could've. Hindsight is such a wonderful thing.

Chase never should've gone down into that death-trap but he did and they have to deal with the aftermath. That's how life is.

House sighs. He's tired. He's hungry. He's anxious.

He'd never admit to any of that but it's the truth.

"Look, he wasn't happy when he stormed out of my place. I figured he needed space. You know? Space? The basic human right? I thought I'd grant him clemency for a couple of hours before I sent the cavalry to bring him back kicking and screaming."

He fails to say that Chase was spooked when he left. Scared shitless, in fact.

He fails to explain that, or why - that the would-be murderous feeling of House's was enough to drive him to extremes.

He looks away. His voice is quiet, distant.

"I didn't know he was this stupid."

"Chase can't do this kind of thing any more, House. He's too fragile."

Perhaps he always will be. House can't even imagine beautiful, physical Chase reduced to this but he isn't good. His health, it seems, has been severely compromised by this moment of madness.

They push the issue, force it so that it bleeds. House tries to cauterise the wound but Chase's condition means it fails to clot despite his attempts.

"He clearly isn't in his right mind. He's been missing his appointments when he hasn't been properly discharged. We're worried about his mental state."

"He didn't want to talk any more. The meetings made him worse so he decided he was better off without them. You ever hear of free will?"

"Quite frankly, we don't think him mentally stable enough for that."

They consider putting him on a psych hold when they bring him round because this is the act of an irresponsible kid that cannot be trusted. He would do better in a safe, secure environment where he can be moderated, rehabilitated.

"He can't be trusted without boundaries."

"What kid can? Are we going to lock them all up until they're middle aged so they don't screw up?"

"He's not a kid, Dr House."

It's 'Dr' now. House can tell they're getting serious.

"What he is is an adult who has mentally regressed and needs assistance. Physical restraint, if necessary."

They criticise his management of a critical situation and he seethes. _You do better_, he wants to say, but he fears they'll take on the challenge.

"If I could legally ground him I would. If I could physically restrain him I'd do it. Despite everything, I'm not his father."

"He has mental capabilities that are more limited than we thought. He needs more structured care."

"You want to declare him incompetent? You want him institutionalised? You'll kill him."

"Then, get a court order for legal responsibility or we will have him held here indefinitely like we should've done already."

The truth is, they say, Chase isn't capable of making moral and personal decisions any more than he's capable of making medical ones.

He's reckless. Stupid.

"Young and confused," House argues, "but that's just pedantics."

He looks down at Chase, intubated and restrained, and they say it again.

Get an order. Make it legal or lose him to the system.

House can only imagine Chase waking up screaming, forced against his will into a legally binding guardianship with a man he fears wants him dead. Poor bastard, he thinks. They'd see it as the delusion of a damaged brain.

He'll get the order.

He'll get the order because, despite everything he doesn't trust anyone else with 'his' Chase.

"You're not going to ruin him," he says, as he puts a hand on Chase's forehead, as he touches him because he can. "You're not going to overmedicate him to keep him easy so you can teach him how to weave baskets for your grandparents."

He doesn't trust them.

Looking at him in this state, however, House wonders if he trusts himself.

()

It's frightening, to House, how easy it is to take charge of someone's life in the eyes of the law yet after a short hearing he has charge of Chase's.

He barely even has charge of his own.

The whole world changes once again as he lies sleeping. House becomes Jamie Spears to Chase's Britney. Owner. Conservator. Legal guardian. His responsibility is judge appointed and it's power personified. Chase would require permission to access cash, to sign up for credit. To refuse or partake in medical treatment and, in extreme

circumstances, to leave the house.

House's 'say' is absolute. Chase's is an afterthought. In a sense, Chase's free will is obsolete.

House sits beside him now and waits for the meds to wear off. It pleases him that they still have the ties on his wrists, that his throat will be raw and painful when he awakens. Its not that he wants him to suffer, just that he wants him still. In this unfortunate state he can't yell at him to leave. He can't walk away.

He can scream in other ways, though, through heart rate, through BP and so House silences him with the soft turning of dials.

There is panic when he awakens in a place he doesn't remember being in. He was with Anton. He was with Anton and...oh, God, House.

"Hush, calm down," House says, as he allows Chase his momentary dramatics. He twists his wrists to attempt escape. He crackles around the grazes left by his breathing tube. He looks like he wants to cry because waking up in this state isn't new any more and he knows exactly why, this time.

_His fault. His own fault._

There's a tube in his arm feeding him God only knows what and he wants it out, wants it out now. He feels dizzy and confused, knows they've had him knocked out but for how long?

How long has he been unconscious? How long has he been restrained like this?

"It won't do any good," House says nonchalantly. He strokes the tan-leather, lined as it is, encasing Chase's wrists firmly, tightly. "They used the heavy duty ones to keep you down. You're a fighter, Foreman says."

A fighter. A man that cannot bear to be restrained.

"I hear your fish out of water routine was pretty entertaining."

Chase's emotions are totally free, at this point, a stark contrast to the control he used to assert over them. When he gathers enough coherence he makes his feelings known.

"Why don't you just leave me alone?"

House smiles.

"You won't be saying that for long. You have but two choices, pretty boy. They keep you here indefinitely, so you can get used to the bondage because they think you're self destructive. Or, you can get over yourself and come home with me."

Chase continues to idly pull against their restraints as he defiantly asks "What's choice number three? You put a pillow over my face?"

His words are thunder but his voice is but a gentle breeze. It can't be anything more, not with this bruising to his vocal chords. He is but a whisper on the wind.

As House touches a hand to his chest he violently looks away.

"I said just leave me alone."

"I'll give you some time to think it over. I have patients to see. Clinic duty. They're worthwhile, Chase. They actually _want_ to get better."

Cutting words from a new 'father' to his 'adoptive son.'

"Get some rest. I hear you were seizing so hard you almost dislocated your shoulder. That would be dumb considering all the hard work you've put into it."

If those words penetrated Chase's anger it doesn't register.

It gives him something to think about, though.

(*)

Nothing changes.

His eyes look anything but happy when House returns. It's like walking into a minefield. Chase is so volatile right now, so angry, so emotionally impaired.

"You weren't lying. They said they can keep me against my will, now. I can't leave without you saying I can. I can't go anywhere unless it's with you. It's worse than last time. They think I'm incompetent. Is that true?"

"That was a stupid thing you did," House says, and he knows Chase is listening because he's staring at him. Then, more quietly, he adds: "You freak out about what I said and then you try to do it yourself. Of course you're incompetent. You think you can still pull the Cheech and Chong routine?"

Chase continues to fight his emotions. House can see the inner struggle. He wants out. He wants to get away. He needs to get used to being held, to seeking escape that legally might never come.

"I tried to leave. I might've been a little angry but...they sedated me. Tied me down again. I woke up half an hour ago and told them what you said. They thought I was delusional. Confused, they said. That's how it is now?"

House softens. He doesn't want Chase scared or distrustful. He doesn't want him on edge, in pain. That was never his intention.

He looks so acidic. So young and so bitter.

"You want me dead and _I'm_ the one locked up. How does that work?"

"I was out of my mind," House argues. "I must've been. Where's the fun in breaking something that was broken a long time ago? I can't tell you why I did it, only that I did. You wanted honesty and there it is, Chase. Suck it up."

It's true. Isolated, clumsy orphaned kid who always, always gets it wrong. Why would House have bothered if he were lucid?

"Look, I'd off myself before I offed you, Chase. The pathetic state you're in it'd be the equivalent of drowning a puppy. I like puppies. They're fun and they have sad eyes. You have sad eyes too, Chase. All the nurses think they're _so _beautiful."

Chase ponders the words, that House would 'off' himself before he'd 'off ' him. His self destructive tendencies run deep enough for that to be believable.

"Let me up?" he says softly, finally. Just that. Nothing more.

House unfastens Chase's restraints as a show of trust, as a truce, as a way of proving he's on his side.

For a moment he is rewarded with nothing but quiet.

"How can I trust you?" Chase asks, after a time, rubbing the bruised wrists with his fingertips. There is a bruise on his tongue, on his mind. His thoughts hurt, as do his words.

"You have nothing to fear – well, except my admittedly terrifying intelligence and my cutthroat wit but you already knew of that."

It's such a difficult thing to believe when you're tied up, rasping by the damage done by machinery, dazed by anaesthetics.

Easier, now that he's 'free'.

"You can trust me. I wouldn't break my own toy. Not now. I won't let you do anything stupid, not again."

Chase so wants to believe it, doesn't trust himself.

He so wants to believe what he thought he already knew.

He bites his lip. It's his way of 'grounding' himself, House has noted. They tell him he needs to monitor more carefully but in some ways he knows this kid better than he knows himself.

He knows what he's going to say before he even says it, voice quiet, eyes fixated unto the ground.

"Just get me out of here."

Get me out of here, he says, and there's no question in his voice.

"Take me home?"

And, there it is. That uncertainty. That little-boy insecurity that melts through the anger.

Though his eyes still hold that distrust and his body language still holds that tension he still takes House's hand when it's offered to him.

He still leans against him when his body begins to stumble.


	43. Chapter 57

_And another little part, partially 'flashback' and ending in a bit of tension, lets say. _

_Chase can't just forgive and forget. He's far too angry for that. House might've thought it'd be easy but it's not. It never is. _

_Sorry. Spamming, here. Just hope that I'm not annoying people. _

_**Part 57**_

"_I need to go."_

_He feels it desperately, the need to remove himself from these walls, from this place. He's claustrophobic where he never was before, doesn't realise that the affliction began to metastasize like an emotional cancer when the walls literally did cave in on him. _

_They've released him from his bindings and it gives him freedom of movement, at least, but the memory of being unable to stir lingers deep within him and it renders him cutting and edgy, sharp around the edges. _

_His voice rises as he searches for a way out, flinches when it seems they're trying to prevent him from reaching it. _

"_I need to go. Now."_

"_Sit down, Mr Chase. Just give yourself time to recover and then we can talk about you leaving."_

"_**No**__."_

_Panic envelops him, thick, hard - thorns in his chest as he tries to breathe. He presses a hand to his heart and he tries to feel it beat, to focus, to find peace but there is none. _

"_No, I can't sit down."_

"_Then lie down. You look flushed. We don't want you passing out, Robert."_

_Robert. Robert. The name itself is alien to him. _

"_Don't call me that."_

"_I'm sorry. Chase, then. We're trying to help you, Chase, now just calm down. We don't want to have to sedate you again."_

"_Then, don't."_

_There are three of them and he doesn't know why, one doctor, two orderlies. Their hands are outstretched as if to placate him, their motions seeping through his bewilderment and settling somewhere within the realms of paranoia. _

_They're behaving as if he's a danger and he doesn't know why. _

"_You don't understand. I shouldn't be here. I don't know what happened but I feel fine. I feel better."_

"_Sit down, Mr Chase."_

_Sit down, he repeats, and the unspoken words are 'sit down before I make you sit down.'_

_Chase doesn't like this, doesn't like this tone, doesn't like this unspoken threat. He doesn't like that he's here and doesn't know how; doesn't like that he's within these walls without knowing why he came to be here. _

_He doesn't like that they let House in to sit with him when his words were so clear and so focused when he told him of the threat against his life. _

"_Just let me out," he says softly, trying his best to remain calm. "I need to go."_

_They're blocking the door, these three. They're holding him inside without touching him at all. The fear backs up inside of him and it threatens him just like House did. _

_He tries to be hard. Tough. He tries to be dominant when he feels so very small; when he recedes in this situation with every second that passes until it all but immerses him. He gathers all of his resources, as flimsy as they are, and he takes a step forward. _

"_Mr Chase – "_

"_Get out of my way," he says. Growls. "__**Now**__."_

_They don't sense the cornered animal that pushes out from within, don't feel the primal fear that spurs him into action in this moment. _

_They don't see the fire in his eyes, burning behind the blue, don't sense the danger of trying to contain him when he is a million atoms all at once and he's waiting impatiently to explode._

"_I mean it. Get out of my way."_

"_I'm afraid we can't do that, Mr Chase. I'm sorry."_

"_Sorry? Sorry? What for?"_

_They step forward. There is no collision. There is no meeting of particles, no volatile reaction, no Great Big Bang. Chase attempts to stand his ground but his legs are not steady and his head feels heavier than it should atop of his shoulders. Trapped, agitated by their liberal restraint he loses his mind for a minute, just for a minute, and reaches blindly for the first thing he can reach. _

_It's terror that drives him to this. In this moment he is just like his mother and the memory of that one vivid interaction crosses by his mind as he throws that vase as hard as he can in their direction, hoping above all things to disperse them so that he can run. _

"_I don't want to hurt you," he whispers, implying that he will. _

_His eyes screw tightly shut. He waits for impact but there is none as the vase itself is caught safe in the arms of his doctor. There was no strength behind it because Chase has no strength but the intent was there._

_The intent was there and the intent was dangerous. _

"_You're unstable, Mr Chase," the doctor says. His voice is firm, his words clear and, as Chase sinks down to the ground in exhausted rage and in toxic disbelief, that man tries his hardest to get through to the patient. "You're not well enough to leave. You're not mentally focused enough for us to release you. We are within our legal rights to hold you using any means necessary."_

_He's not trying to be cruel. He's not attempting to upset the boy but Chase hears those words and they break him. _

"_You can't do this," he growls as he scrambles for stability, as he fights to pull himself into a position that will enable him to run. "I made a mistake. We all make mistakes."_

"_And that's what we're here for. We're trying to stop you from making mistakes, Mr Chase. Dr House is doing the same. We're all committed to giving you the best care possible. You seem to look upon us as the enemy but that's not true at all."_

"_He tried to kill me. Didn't you know? Dr House tried to kill me."_

"_Really?"_

_There it is. There it is in that one word, the disbelief, the indication that anything he says will be taken with the pinch of salt that defines him, now. He's defeated in this moment, dejected, as he falls against the wall. His eyes still burn with a rage that was previously unknown to him and in this moment he hates them. He hates them all. _

"_You're confused. It's understandable. You had a serious neurological event this past 24 hours. It's common for things to get mixed up in your head. Things feel very, very real, Chase, but they're not."_

"_I'm __**not**__ confused. Jesus Christ, do you think I'm stupid?"_

_The way he screams, it's shattering. His face is ragged, wet with tears, and the fury causes him to burn fever-bright. _

_It's pure, unadulterated emotion that causes him to curl his fist up; that demands he drive it into the plate glass that won't smash but will shudder under the weight of his efforts. _

_He swears aloud as his fingers crumble, as the pain causes him to jolt and shudder. _

_It's not that the doctor wants to restrain him but that he's given little choice…_

"_Try not to damage his shoulder," he tells the orderlies as they're given the order to hold him down, to contain him before he damages himself even more than he already has._

_He's still screaming when he's pinned to the floor, his fragile body so spent by the fight that it barely battles at all. _

_He understands in this moment that he no longer has a say; that the camel's back has truly been broken by the straw that was his recent 'misdemeanour'._

_He feels a hand stroking softly on the back of his neck as the needle goes into his arm, hears the whispering words of his doctor telling him to calm down, to go quietly, to let it all just wash over him…_

_The words, they're not unlike the words Anton spoke to him only the circumstances are so much different. _

_Anton had his best intentions at heart; wanted only good things for him. _

"_What do __**you**__ want?" he asks the offending doctor as he begins to feel the drug take effect; as he feels himself being carried away. _

"_For you to be safe," he hears, and it's funny – funny, indeed, that being 'safe' is so much more important than being 'happy'. _

"They just didn't listen," he says, and his eyes betray how disturbed he is by reliving what was done to him whilst House was away. "I told them the truth and they just wanted me quiet."

He sits on the couch that seems cold to him, now, in a room that he no longer feels welcome in.

His being here, it seems, feels like an obligation, now. He looks up and it's not Chase that House sees but someone else. Someone angry. Someone bitter.

Someone who is 'his' in more ways than one, now.

"Is that what you're going to do to me if I say something you don't want to hear, House? You're just going to pin me down and pump me full of drugs?"

House doesn't answer. He gets the feeling the question was rhetorical, doesn't want to invoke any further malevolent emotions in the boy, the boy who seems so adamant to push it, so adamant to break someone other than himself.

"What if I wanted to leave? What would you do? Would you stop me? Would you tie me down to make sure that I couldn't?"

Would he? House doesn't know, can't answer. It's a valid question, however, the validity being just how far would House go in his court appointed 'responsibility' to stop something damaging from occurring. Would it stem to locking him in his room if he threatened to run, calming him pharmaceutically if he got too out of hand?

"What did the big old Judge tell you to do to me if I spoke out of turn? Gag me? Cut out my tongue?"

He's pushing it, now.

He's pushing it because he's scared.

"What about if I said I wanted some time alone? Would that be allowed?"

House snaps when Chase's tone moves from hard done by to nasty, a tone that isn't suited to the softness of his accent; that doesn't sit right behind that girlish mouth and those full, full lips.

"For God's sake…"

"What? For God's sake what, House? Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this when you said I could make my own mistakes?"

"Because if not me then you're back there. There were two options, Chase, and by God it would've been easier to leave you for them to clean up after. Trust me. It's a lot less stress to have you on a locked psych ward than it is to have to take responsibility for you myself but I thought I'd do the right thing."

"Oh, the right thing? Taking over my entire life is the right thing?"

"It was either them or me, you ungrateful little shit, so if you want to be manhandled into four point restraints every time you lose your head then just say the word and I'll drive you straight back there. It's no loss for me."

It is, but he won't say that aloud. He won't reveal that card for that is one he holds so close to his chest that he's barely even looked upon it himself.

He wonders how long this can go on for, this resentment, this agitation of what was so easy before. Now, their voices are raised. Their emotions are raised higher.

"Just say the word."

House sees Chase flicker and then fall, his desperation so vivid it can almost be tasted.

He understands how it is for your life to no longer be your own; to have people thinking that their own opinions are so much more valid than yours.

He sees Chase wring his hands in his sleeves, so desperate to rid himself of these feelings that he'll do anything just to be free of them.

He tries to make the words matter.

"Look, Chase. If I need to put you in the naughty corner to make you see the error of your ways I'm well within my rights to do so. If I think you're a danger to yourself then I can step in and prevent you from doing something idiotic like any other decent human being on the planet. If I think you're being a halfwit then I can call you out on that but I'm not your jailer. I'm not your captor. You're not a hostage and I'm not going to torture you like you seem to think I am."

"Funny," Chase says, "because I seem to have this inkling it was your favourite thing in the world to torture me."

There's no solid incident recalled to back up the thought but he knows its true. He knows from both fleeting thought and anecdote that House was so much harder on him than he was on anybody else and it's valuable, indeed, because it renders House silent.

It renders House silent, the idea that Chase has remembered that above all things if, indeed, he has.

It's only when Chase feels he has 'won' that he continues; that he pushes forth with the revelation.

"Yeah," he says quietly, softly, "yeah, I remember. I remember my feelings being nothing but a game for you then."

His head tilts to the side and he's daring House to respond.

"What are they now, then, Greg? What am I now?"

What is he now? More than a game.

More than a game, House wants to say, but he simply can't find the words.

"I thought as much," Chase says, misunderstanding the silence entirely.

He stands up and it's something akin to the spoiled stepson he never, ever got to be.

"I'm going to my room," he says, his voice a monotone. He inserts a bitter ingredient just to make the words mean more. "That's is, if you're allowing me to."

"Go," House replies and then, just to even the score, he says "Lockdown isn't until nine so you might want to get your toilet duties out of the way by then. I don't want you wetting the bed."

The words are cutting. Cruel, even, but House's delivery has a certain familiarity that Chase recognises immediately. There is no flinch. There is no momentary confusion whilst he tries to assert whether or not it's a jest.

It calms him, somehow, the cruelty of it.

It pacifies him in ways he will never understand.


	44. Chapter 58

_Hello All. Thank you for the lovely reviews. It always puts a smile on my face when people care enough to comment. Please continue to do so. It does help. _

_Chase is acting like a bit of a brat at the minute but he is scared, angry, trapped and upset which is why he's so worked up. It also has a lot to do with his brain injury. It did alter his behaviour a fair bit and he still finds it difficult to contain himself, at times. Doesn't mean he'll never forgive House, just that it won't always be sweetness and light._

_This next chapter (again, sorry for overkill) is kind of working towards their resolution. I hope it's okay. _

**Part 58**

There is a precise moment in time when House's whole world is spun into that same virtual chaos he has forever felt himself lingering on the edge of. He can name it, now. He can pinpoint that millisecond in his universe where time simply stands still for him and he realises, beyond reasonable doubt, that this is to be his future.

He stands on the carpet outside of Chase's room. The oak-wood door is shut tight, though the inside lock is broken as one of the 'terms' of Chase's release. There can be no physical barriers between them, even if the mental ones are double-locked and dead-bolted. He considers opening the door, proving his free-pass place in Chase's world but he doesn't. He doesn't cross the threshold un-invited, a vampire in his own home. He permits Chase that little illusion of freedom even if it's not real.

He's about to knock when he hears it, the gentle lulling sound of a young man's voice as it loses itself in prayer. He hears this youth, this child of thirty-one as he says his prayers in the only language that he ever felt love in. House only recognises it as a prayer when he hears the name 'Jesus' uttered amongst the unfamiliar sounds that Chase's grandmother taught him as a tiny child.

He always thought that the Czech nation were devout non-believers, agnostics that needed proof, that searched for science in place of God. There's something unspeakably beautiful about hearing one of God's most lost children speaking to the Father with such quiet grace it takes House's breath away.

This is Chase stripped down, bare, raw and unchallenged yet still there are barriers in place. Language barriers. Personal barriers. It's haunting, the fact that House knows nothing of what Chase's prayers entail, as if the boy is too guarded and too distrustful to allow anyone but God hear his pleas. He hears the word 'uspokojit'. It stuck in his mind a long, long time ago when he was treating a nineteen year old Czech girl who could only plead with him for answers, for help. Over and over again she said that word.

_Uspokojit_.

Chase says it now and House wonders that he is begging for, what he is pleading for in these soft-spoken words bound only for his maker.

His hand pauses. Falls away. He won't knock now. Who is he to disturb this? Who is he to interrupt?

He hears his own name mentioned, Gregory, not House. Three times, he hears it spoken, lost between rows and layers of that old European language. He feels like a voyeur as he tries to pick out meaning, logic behind the lyrical prose. There is no meaning. For House, there isn't supposed to be, for these prayers are Chase's and Chase's alone. No Judge can force him to turn them over. No Court in the land can make him reveal the words he speaks to God.

There's art in this, House thinks. There's beauty in this as well as frustration. He curses Chase for permitting himself to be vulnerable in a way that House will never understand, for being the puzzle with instructions he cannot read. At the same time he loves him for it, loves him for this tiny, gentle 'fuck you' to those that try to get inside of his head and pull out things he doesn't want to set free.

"Good for you," he whispers. Good for you.

It keeps him interested, how this seminary boy speaks in tongues; how he reveals his secrets in ways that ensure nobody else can take from him.

It's as he's walking away that Chase takes him by surprise by calling out to him. He knew, knew all along that House was there, that House was listening.

Still, he prayed. Still, he allowed himself that little moment 'alone' with his spoken thoughts.

"Goodnight," he says, and then, seemingly as an afterthought: "Mnohokrát děkuji, Bůh vám žehnej."

Thank you, he says. God bless you.

There is silence. Mass has ended. Let us go in peace to love and to serve.

The offertory is given. The incense has burned down.

"Goodnight," House says, the word handed back, the gesture returned.

House knows, now. He knows that Chase is destined to be the most important thing in his jumbled little life, meaningless as it has been up until now – that the jumbled little puzzle that he is will turn into his life's work, a million piece jigsaw that he will sped night after night attempting to complete yet might never, ever conquer.

They say there's more fun in the chase.

Never have those words rang so true.

(*)

"You know what I learned at Seminary School?"

"Hmm, let me guess. The meaning of life? The madness of hundreds of people high on burning incense and gullible to the point of mass hysteria?"

He jokes. He mocks. Its okay, though, because Chase knows he always did.

"No. I learned that even the worst things on Earth, the truest crimes and the most evil acts imaginable, warrant forgiveness if there is genuine remorse."

House ponders the deeper meaning for both him and for Chase but chooses not to go directly to it.

Instead, he challenges it. He takes it on headfirst. Forgiveness, he says?

"If The Fuhrer himself said he was sorry for being a bad, bad boy then the six million would mean nothing? That's flawed, Chase. Even God must see no logic in that."

"If he was sorry then that would be accounting for."

Sometimes he still has trouble pronouncing words, figuring out tenses. House notices sometimes, noticed then. Accounted becomes accounting. Sometimes he mixes up sexes, too. He becomes she.

Foreman took such great offence at being labelled female.

House shakes his head at Chase's leniency upon a mass murderer, ironic since he killed one.

"Don't even think about saying any of that in front of Taub. He was practically there, you know?"

"There are no limits to forgiveness provided the repentance is genuine."

"Is that true?"

"Yeah."

He quickly becomes distracted. Agitated, in a way. House noted he often behaves in this manner when he's remembering, when he's going to a place he doesn't want to go to.

He senses meaning, is rewarded with it. He's setting the scene for House's absolution.

"I remember the first time I had a reaction to strawberries. I was five. My mum never let me have them before. She said they were for special occasions. I guess she just didn't like them. When she was pregnant they used to give her terrible heartburn."

"Damn those evil red things."

Chase fiddles with a pen as he talks. It stays out of his mouth for the time being but it'll end up there, no doubt, for that is his pattern, his trend.

"I was at a cousin's birthday party. There was a giant cake and a fruit punch. I remember there being a bouncy castle and everything. I loved it."

He sounds so distant. So far away.

He never had such things on his own birthday.

"I only has a small sip of the fruit punch. Mum said it'd ruin my appetite if I drank too much of it. All I remember is my tongue tingling first. Then I couldn't breathe."

"You got to five years old before that happened. Pretty amazing,considering strawberries have world domination when it comes to bubble baths and stuff."

Chase never had bubble baths, did he? Such a travesty.

"It feels like your throat shutting up when it happens. Your mouth becoming full when it isn't. I was a little kid then. I was terrified. They got me an ambulance. My mum, she was crying..."

He takes a deep breath, the thought of being unable to so vivid in his mind.

"You can't even see the scar from the trach any more but I felt the knife cut the skin and finally I could breathe again. At first I thought they were trying to kill me with that scalpel. I thought I was dying. My dad told me to be a man."

He smiles.

"I was five."

It's easy to imagine. Frightening. Terror beyond belief when you can't get air into your lungs even though you fight, you fight...

"Every time it happened, that I had another reaction, I thought I was dying. Once after a milkshake. Another time from Fructis shampoo. Then there was the time Anne kissed me with strawberry shortcake lip gloss. That was fun. Really. She saw me unconscious on oxygen before she saw me naked."

And then there was me, House thinks. I made him feel that way again.

"You carry Epinephrine now. You didn't have it that night."

"Even with an Epi it still feels the same for awhile. Like death. Like total suffocation."

Like being immersed in soil; buried alive.

"I'm sorry," House says, because he is. He's sorry he did that. He's sorry some warped part of him purposely wanted to inflict that upon this kid. Was it an underlying resentment that forced his hand? Was it that he was happy this attractive, intelligent boy was as messed up as he was and couldn't cope with him moving on?

Was it to do with Vogler?

"I really am sorry," he says, more meaning this time. "I was sick. I was warped and I was wrong."

"I know."

"I still apologise."

"I know you're sorry. If I learned nothing else it was that people do bad things. It might take me awhile to trust but I can try to understand. I can forgive."

"You never forgave your dad," House says, though he doesn't quite know why he picks at that wound when he remembers how it bled. "You never forgave him for any of it. For leaving you. For leaving your Mom. He said he was sorry but you didn't want to know. You didn't want to hear it."

Chase can only clench his jaw, ride out the unwanted emotion.

"I guess that means I never believed he meant it."

No, House thinks, as he recalls a proud, obtuse man so blind to what he could have had.

No, neither did I.

(*)

"If I told you I wanted to move back to Australia would you let me?" he asks, a random question fresh from a moment's thought.

"Nope. Not a chance. Stupid country. Full of dingoes and other abominations."

"Koalas, kangaroos, wombats. Right. What about if I wanted to go back to England, then?"

"Ha! I always knew you were British. And, no. The upper lip isn't stiff enough."

Chase pauses. Thinks. The cogs turn in that scarred head of his. House sees it, the curiosity, the wilful testing of boundaries. He also notes how his thought processes have quickened recently despite everything. He's not so literal now. He expresses sarcasm and completely comprehends it.

"What if I said I was going back to the seminary?"

"With that smile and those eyes? That would be criminal. I'd put you in a Posey jacket and have you committed myself. Not a chance. I told the Judge I'd consider your best interests, not indulge your stupidity."

Chase demonstrates the aforementioned smile despite himself, neutered, as it were. He nods his head as he processes the facts of this experiment.

"Okay."

"Does that make it clearer?"

"I guess."

"Any more hypothetical situations you want to throw at me? Space tourism, for instance?"

"No?"

"Right. Glad we got that cleared up for you."

Chase feels calmer about things, now that he has tread the lines drawn.

The waters he tested were tepid, indeed.


	45. Chapter 59

_Another part to be posted, this one rather big, I'm afraid. It does involve a certain character who shall remain nameless but who I feel was a negative aspect of our little Chase's life. Cue pitbull House marking his territory pretty well. _

_Thank you for those that took the time to review, again, and hello to the new readers if you are still with me. Like I always say, drop me a line if you have any 'requests' that I can attempt to implement! _

**Part 59**

"Those damn shrinks."

House doesn't heed the 'do not disturb' sign on Wilson's door, cares not for the middle aged sports fan in the facing chair.

He looks directly at the man and says "They think I'll kill somebody one day" which the poor guy sees as his cue to leave. As hefty as he is he practically flies up, defies gravity, mumbling something that sounds like an apology for the woeful act of wasting someone's time.

He'll see Wilson in a week, he says, belying his previous assertion.

Wilson holds his peace, as always, until the door closes tightly and he is left alone with this would-be homicidal maniac.

It doesn't scare him, is a mere fizzle rather than an explosion.

"So, is it me you're likely to off, House? If it is can you get it over with? I'm kind of busy."

"Kind of busy or actually busy? You're either busy or you're not."

Wilson runs his forehead in circular motions. His pedantics get tedious after a time.

"House-"

"Oh relax. That was just a clever ruse. It's not me that's seeing the shrinks."

"Perhaps that is something we need to address. Your social skills and respect for other people is, as always, impeccable."

"They did convince Chase to confront his past, though – a stupid idea, if you ask me, considering his past barely exists. Now he's adamant he wants to see Miss Moral Compass the Second."

A frown. A look of bafflement from Wilson. "Whose the first?"

"Focus on what's important, James."

"What? So, he wants to see her. She was his wife. The woman he mistakenly chose to spend eternity with. Do you blame him?"

"Yes."

"Oh, sure, because in his position you wouldn't be at least curious."

House shrugs.

"I could leave it alone. He should leave it alone."

Then Wilson opts to detonate.

"What if he can't? What if he can't leave it alone? If you stop this from happening he'll hate you for it. It could ruin everything."

It pains House to hear those words, that thought, because he knows it's true.

He knows he can't protect Chase from everything without damaging him in the process. They say that some germs are good germs after all.

A sterile environment isn't good for anybody.

(*)

It's like a custody hearing, Wilson recommending a loosely supervised visit on 'Robert's' grounds, House wanting no contact at all.

"You can't keep him locked away."

"Oh no? I have papers at home that say I can do anything I want."

Wilson ponders the hopelessness of this statement, of House's stubborn delusion of grandeur. He is God, now, more than he ever was. He governs. He presides.

He makes choices, good and bad.

He still remains selfish, possessive, even now.

"She'll probably fall in love with him. She might even propose."

She'll waltz in here and give a crap when she never did before.

"I think you should let him see her. Yes, it might open up a messy can of worms but you thrive on that. Remember when Papa Chase showed up? You practically forced them together to see what happened."

It's true. Chase was entertainment back then. Now, it'd be akin to laughing at a Trisomy 13 sufferer trying to sing karaoke.

Wilson sighs.

"House, you came here for my opinion."

"Actually, I came for the view but by all means delude yourself."

"I think it'd be good for him. If you think it's going badly you can throw her out."

Wilson appeals to House's 'bad' side because the devil on his shoulder always wins in the end.

He sees the look cross his features, that look of ultimate control and how to maintain it.

"If things get ugly you end it. Simple as that."

Simple as that, House thinks, but things are rarely simple at all.

He nods his head finally, agreeable even in reluctance.

If it has to happen he'd rather be the one to call the shots.

(*)

"What's with this burning desire to see her?" he asks. "She never appealed before. You didn't even know her last time. What changed? What have they done, brainwashed you?"

"If I have to go to these ridiculous sessions I might as well listen to what they say. It makes sense to see him."

"Her."

Chase flushes hard.

"_Her_. It makes sense to see _her_. I don't know her but I loved her. That must mean something."

"Yeah. It means you loved her. It means she dumped you and you were sad for awhile but then moved on. It means it's over, Chase. What are you going to learn from a failed marriage?"

"Who I was, maybe? What I loved? She was my wife. She knew me better than anyone."

House has to smile at that, the naivety, the idealism.

"She didn't know you at all."

Still, House calls her. How sickeningly defensive she is when he speaks with her, how self-suffering and how hurt. House hadn't expected that. He hadn't expected near-tears and audible relief.

"I've been waiting for you. Shame on you for not calling me sooner."

"Why would I?"

"Because it makes sense for him to want to see me and I want to help."

"No, you want to buzz around. You want to weep over him. You want to feed him. You want to hold his hand and change his diapers."

"Is that what you think of me?"

"It's the truth, isn't it?"

She still feels she's important to the man she couldn't love enough. She still feels she's relevant to the husband who never matched up.

It irks House that Chase's idiot doctors think the same.

"Don't expect a Hollywood reunion, Chase. You're not going to lay eyes upon her and fall to your knees."

"So, she's coming?"

It's with great dissatisfaction that House says: "She's coming."

(*)

She sits in the mirror with her hair falling down around her shoulders. She puts blush on her cheeks and liner around her eyes.

She pulls her hair back, analyses her appearance and asks herself "Would he like this?"

She doesn't know why she does that. occurs to her that she's never had that thought before.

She pulls on a plain black sweater and wears the earrings that Chase bought her for Christmas. She tries to look neat. Non-threatening.

As she runs the lipstick across her mouth it's with a slow hand, soft, precise.

There are tears in her eyes but she doesn't know why.

(*)

She watches them interact, so different to before. She watches how House looks at Chase in a way she never anticipated he could; in a way she wished he had looked at her. It's as if the universe exists of just those two, like nothing exists but them – two atoms staring at each other in space and time just waiting to collide.

House makes it clear she is on the periphery looking in. He excludes her before they even begin, his back to her, his eyes focused only on 'his boy'.

The way he speaks to Chase ("If she tries anything just scream rape and I'll come running") is quasi-caring. The way Chase smiles tolerantly by return, that's just beautiful ("Yeah, yeah. Hobbling, don't you mean?")

Their affection is genuine. Real.

There's nothing more real than House's hand on Chase's shoulder physically encouraging him where he needs it.

Cameron's chest aches. It aches when Chase, _her Robert_, reaches out to grab House's arm as he's walking away; aches as she sees the edgy look in his eyes and hears those quiet words of House's whispering "I'll be right here."

She's never seen that before. She never thought she would.

There's no 'ruin' here. No necrosis. No festering rut, like she expected to see.

There is just this. Fertile. Growing. Blooming, even.

She tries to be stoic. She tries to be brave but it's all new, new place, new circumstances. New Chase, stood in the doorway with his boyish face and his glasses on, younger than he ever was and so susceptible it makes her want to weep.

This is alien territory for her. She removes her coat gently places it neatly onto the hook that hangs on the wall. When she looks at him properly she almost breaks down.

"Don't," House warns, out of Chase's earshot. "Don't make this hard on him."

Cameron's eyes flicker. Guilt. Pain. Surprise. She doesn't know what it is, doesn't know what this is only that House's eyes are bearing into her, more intense than he's ever been and his words are layered in protectiveness.

It moves her.

Nothing moves her more, however, than the fact that Chase, a man that once loved her, cannot even look her in the eye. This is worse than seeing him in Intensive Care, bruised and beaten and on life support.

This is worse than anything.

"Hi," she says, as House admits her into his home, their home – as he steps into the kitchen to give them the 'privacy' they require.

She moves closer and the flash-memory is hers. She sees herself years younger pushing him against the wall, forcing herself upon him because she knew he would not refuse.

She sees his young face shocked, surprised (intimidated?) as she tries to invoke his 'bad boy' side. She remembers how she ignored his protests, accusing him of being something other than a good guy. She remembers how she often ignored his protests yet succeeded in bringing him around to her way of thinking because he was so desperate to please her.

Looking at him now it's hard to believe they ever had anything at all.

He looks up. Shy. Restrained. He feels her hand on his arm and he it causes him to jump.

"Sorry."

It hurts her to hear him apologise. He always did. He always said he was sorry when she never could.

"Would you like to sit down? We can talk better if you're comfortable."

She speaks to him as if he's a little boy. Gentle. Soft. She speaks to him as if he's a patient, so overly empathic as she tries her best not to startle him.

Her overwhelming thought is "This was my husband."

This was her husband, this man that shrinks before her. And that man in the kitchen, that man who watches with hawk-like eyes ready to dig his claws in should she harm him, is a man she once adored.

She's never felt more like an outsider; an intruder amongst loved ones.

A snake in a tranquil haven.

(*)

"Do you remember anything at all?"

She's nice. She was never this nice. She was never this gentle even when confronting about toxic hate; about child abuse.

She never picked up on Chase's non-verbal communications even when they were plain to see.

"I remember feelings. Downs and ups. Your voice sounds familiar. There's nothing specific."

"Not even our wedding?"

He doesn't remember his father's death. Why would he remember that?

He shakes his head, scraping his thumbnail along the side of the chair.

"It's nothing personal."

"It's okay. It was a beautiful day, though. I have a DVD at home somewhere. I could send it to you."

She can't read his eyes. She can't read his face any more. She doesn't know if it was the wrong thing to say.

She doesn't know anything any more.

"Right. Thanks."

Two words and then quiet. Then nothing. There was never silence like this. Not until after Dibala, when Chase would spend his evenings sleeping on the couch or staring into oblivion, unable to be reached, unable to be stirred.

She remembers seeing him so desperate for something she couldn't give him.

She speaks despite herself. Quiet. Emotional. It's selfish, in a way, what she says.

"I hate to see you this way, Robert."

He won't comment upon that. He picks up only on the name, tries to sound neutral, tries to smile but his voice cracks.

"Don't call me that. Please."

"I'm sorry."

She wonders what she's doing here, why she came. She wonders why she ever came to Chase, the man she could never love yet loved regardless.

He looks plaintive when she asks him. Embarrassed, almost.

"I just, um...I just wanted to know who I was. Who I loved, you know?"

He holds his arms against his chest, a barrier between them. She wants to hold him, wants to push him away. She wants to gather him close, she wants to run far, run far...

"I thought it might help me but I look at you and I see nothing."

"It's okay – "

"It really isn't. I loved you."

"God knows why you ever loved me. The last time I saw you...the old you, I mean, I told you I was the one that was broken, not you. I was the one that couldn't be fixed."

He smiles sadly and it's so beautiful, so beautiful.

"Now it's me."

"Not you. It was never you."

Her eyes haze over. Oh Robert, she thinks. Oh Chase…

This time when she touches him he doesn't pull away.

"It was never you."

His wrist feels so tiny, tinier than it ever was. There are fading bruises, puncture marks on his arms. She touched the bruises so softly knowing that she bruised him more.

He allows himself to be manipulated physically as she turns his arms inwards, as she inspects the path of those bruises and adds them up in her head.

She wonders what he did to deserve that; to warrant restraint, chemical and physical. The though of him agitated takes her back to her first husband, his last days, out of his mind on morphine…

He never meant it.

"I had a little moment the other day," Chase says, softly. "I guess I did get a little crazy. It's not as bad as it looks, honestly."

"And, these?"

She touches those puncture marks.

"Medication. I need a lot of it."

"You wouldn't even take Aspirin when we were together. You used to get such terrible ear infections. You'd be up all night sometimes because you refused even that."

"Since I was a teenager," he says. Smiles. "I don't tell anyone about that because I didn't want to look like a wuss. I guess you really were my wife if you know about that."

The way he fidgets in his seat is so Chase. It's so natural to him.

The way he smiles when he opens up, sweet and self-deprecating, it was something she never loved until she loved him.

"I need more than Aspirin these days," he says, his hand rubbing absently over his head. "I've learned to stop being so stubborn."

The words touch Cameron somewhere deep down. Her mind screams "Poor Chase" as her heart screams "_My_ Chase."

His head?

His head screams nothing at all.

His head tilts as he tries to take in her words, her voice, her stories.

This woman's a stranger to him, now more than ever.

(*)

She gives him time. He needs time.

She gives him space because he needs that too. Then she waits for him to come to her, doesn't force it like she wants to because this needs careful cultivation.

He's so damaged.

He's so different.

"I'm sorry if I seem a little off," he says after a time, a sad, shy smile playing about his lips, cute, lopsided. "I just…I haven't been myself in a long time."

"You were never shy," Cameron states. Chase can shrug his shoulders knowing that it's probably true.

"Its not that I'm shy. I just that I find it hard to control my emotions and I get nervous when I don't know what to say. I guess you couldn't get me to shut up before, right?"

"You had your moments."

He laughs at that.

"My mum used to say that."

The ice breaks suddenly and then gradually falls away. He's like the timid four year old that hides behind his father's legs only to emerge as bright as starlight once the walls dissolve. He seems...coherent. It's only when you spend time with him that you realise what he's lost. From afar he seems perfect. Miraculous.

That is simply not true any more.

"They tell me I should take risks. Open up. To be honest, I think they talk shite but I have to try. I, um...I want to do well."

He wants to do well but the cracks are glaring. It's sad. It's sad to watch him struggle, though they say he's come a long way with his understanding and perception skills. He functions as an adult in thought processes, albeit a delayed adult. Emotionally, he's further away. She sees that. If there was a maternal side to trigger she might well be feeling pangs, now.

"I just can't believe I married a blonde."

"I was brunette when we started up," she replies and though he nods his head she gets the sneaking suspicion he has no idea what she means. Cameron notes issues with cognition, language, his short span of concentration where he could listen for hours before. She notes he has trouble with long, drawn out stories and prefers directness to

hold his attention.

She asks if it's hard for him.

"I find things difficult to follow sometimes. House tends to write things down if I need to know them but...to be honest, sometimes I find it hard to read, too."

"It'll come," she says, blindly optimistic.

He just shrugs.

"Maybe."

He touches his ear when he begins to get confused and she takes it as a cue to slow down. She never saw his cues before, like how he would touch the back of his neck when she was pushing him too hard, how he would fiddle with whatever he could grab if he was nervous.

"Sorry," he says, as he visibly switches off as she's talking to him. He laughs gingerly. "I'm a mess."

Weren't those her words to him?

"Its okay. I was going off on tangents."

"Its alright," he says, but it's not. He can't focus on more than one thing at once. The expression on his face when he tries mirrors physical pain so she tries to keep on one subject at a time to save him from effort.

His efforts, indeed, are commendable.

"You always tried," she says softly, knowing that she didn't. "You never gave up. You were always persistent, I'll give you that."

Persistent.

She sees a trend of mouthing words he doesn't understand as if to lock them to memory for later contemplation. He won't ask her the meaning. She wonders if it's out of embarrassment.

"You can't give up in life. I fell off my board a million times before I learned to surf. Had to climb back on. I was bruised as Hell but the girls loved that."

His humour is less ironic now. His smile, it's freer than it was and he will laugh without reservation, beautiful, charming. He's just a boy, though, and though Chase is younger than Cameron already he has fallen behind her even more.

Chase doesn't recognise his former wife - but she doesn't recognise him either.

She smiles, overwhelmed by all of this. She feels a rush of what she might perceive as love for the man that sits before her.

The one overriding thought is _"he didn't deserve what I did to him."_

"You were good to me," she says, holding his hand. "I didn't appreciate it when it mattered and...I'm sorry."

Finally, she says it.

"I'm so sorry I hurt you. I'm so sorry I left you in the way that I did."

It's bewildering for Chase because he doesn't know what she's talking about. It's like coming into a story half way, reading a book without the middle pages.

He understands the end – but not how the end came to be.

"I'm so sorry I used you, Chase. You deserved so much better than that."

Sorry. She's sorry.

She's asking for forgiveness and that conversation with House is so fresh, so new. Chase doesn't know what Cameron is apologising for but if those feelings he had, still has, are anything to go by there was a lot. Expanses, in fact.

She is sorry. He can feel it.

She's sorry for both of them but there is closure, here. There is closure for the boy that doesn't know how or why he suffered for this woman.

She chokes back a sob. Her hand flies to her mouth and it's Chase comforting her. The man that lost everything, he offers even more.

"It's okay," he says, that soft voice of forgiveness so vivid between them.

"I'm sorry this happened to you," she continues and he whispers " So am I."

(*)

They talked. She cried and he comforted her. She told him they had fun and then it was over.

She proved House correct for stating 'everybody lies' when she told him it simply ended, no rhyme, no reason.

When he left she told him she'll see him real soon, another lie, perhaps.

House doesn't warm to her and her resolve quakes a little.

"He seems good. Better."

"The last time you saw him he could barely fasten his own shoelaces. He can almost button his shirt, now. Daddy's so proud."

"Do you have to mock him like that?" she says, and he will only say "Don't."

He still seems defensive, even now. He sent Chase to lie down, the visit taking so much out of him that he became vague; absent, even. Cameron had feared a complex partial seizure but he just zoned out, achingly tired from all of this

She had fleetingly wondered if House played the real father and tucked Chase in. It wasn't jealousy she felt but it was something.

She looks...broken.

"He's gone, isn't he? The Robert he was?"

And, isn't the House she knew gone too?

"Don't pretend you're mourning him, Cameron. You didn't even love him to begin with."

Her eyes become crystalline.

They shimmer.

"How can you say that?"

"Because we both know it's true. He doesn't know much but he knows that. You weren't upset for him today, Cameron. You were upset for yourself because you had to see him like that. You weren't whimpering for what he is, you were whimpering for how difficult it is for you to accept it."

It's cruel. It's cruel, and House knows it.

It's cruel…but what she did was more cruel.

"It was all about you. It always was. It was never about him. You just came to stare at the trainwreck."

She is quiet. She is quiet because she cannot explain. It's complicated. It's inevitably confusing. It stretches her and she's close to the 'give' already. She knows better than to argue with House when he's this way inclined but she can't help it.

_All this hate. It's toxic._

"I care about him. More than you can imagine."

"You didn't care when he needed you to."

"You don't know what you're talking about, Greg, please. I want him to know that he can call me any time if it helps him. I need him to know that."

"Oh, you _need_? You need him to know that?"

"Yes."

"Sickness and health, Cameron. Good and bad. He_ needed_ you before. Where were you?"

It angers her, the accusation.

It bubbles and boils within her and she cannot fight it back any more.

"Where were you but in his head? In his blood? What he needed then was psychiatric assistance and a ticket as far away from you as possible. You were poison for him but he wouldn't let you go."

"Am I still poison, Cameron? Do you still want him as far away from me as possible?"

To that, she has no answer.

He almost feels bad for this; for this volatile exchange, for this shattering omission of home truths.

He watches her struck with realisation as he asks her "Answer me this, Allison. Was your love any less toxic?"

Was it? She can't say. The way her shoulders sag and the way her eyes flicker downwards screams loudly, though.

It ends, now. It ends on this note.

"Thanks for coming," House says, his voice devoid of familiarity.

She looks at him with her eyes shadowed and her face spent.

"Tell Robert I hope he feels better soon."

She concedes, in that parting sentence.

As juvenile as it is, House enjoys that he has won.

(*)

"She seemed alright," Chase whispers to the man who sits in the darkness in that chair beside his bed.

"What do you know? You're brain damaged. You don't know anything about the woman."

"True."

"Go to sleep, Chase."

"She did seem nice, though. Not my type but…nice."

"Sleep. Your baseless comments are distracting me from my thoughts."

Chase feels House watching him. Guarding him.

He doesn't feel intimidated or suffocated, just…cared for.


	46. Chapter 60

**Part 60**

He's a solitary martyr when he's in pain, feels pity for himself only when there is nobody to witness such a thing.

He's Joan of Arc with a cane and a penis and a haircut that's at least human, not like some medieval page boy that got lucky with a bowl.

He's Jesus, a man with a harsh, absent father and mother that pulls a veil over her eyes and pretends not to notice. If he stretched his arms outwards to form a cross then the comparison would be complete.

He slept badly last night, his rest coming in spurts from the 'comfort' of a worn leather chair because he was so afraid of Chase bolting in the night after Cameron left. His leg screams in punishment today, a choir of little demons with hammers to drum the beat into absent muscle and bone.

It doesn't help that they're knee deep in drama and two men down, nor does it help that a devil in a blue dress with eyes to match is breathing fire down his neck without reservation.

"You know," he says, as he props his leg up on the table to release some of the pressure, "you look a little like Katy Perry when your breasts are wearing blue. Did _you_ kiss a girl? Did _you_ like it?"

"About as much as you liked kissing Wilson, House."

"Ouch."

She looks down - embarrassed, humiliated, he doesn't know what but she makes no attempt to cover herself. He's hoping the 'compliment' keeps her at arm's length just to give him a break but it doesn't.

One of his tactics of masking pain is through humour and he knows that she knows.

He just hopes she picks up on it without him having to spell it out.

"House, what are you doing?"

"I'm resting, what does it look like?

"It looks like you're slacking off. You're supposed to be working. You have a case. Remember? Fifty-six year old male? Unexplained rash? Cardiac arrythmia? Numbness in his extremities?"

"Fascinating, I'm sure."

"It also looks like you're not doing what you're paid to do which is diagnose patients."

"I had a tough night. My massage therapist cancelled on me this morning, something about a threesome, I don't know, and a woman in labour had the nerve to take up the hydro-pool before I even got the chance to take a bath. I'm screwed. That is, unless you want to work some magic with your hands. Your nosy Prince Charming told me you were a diamond with your fingertips."

"House – "

"What? I'm just saying. You're the boss. As the boss you need to start making sacrifices for your employees. You need to jump into the fire and get burned if you want Baby Princeton to stay afloat."

She looks stiff and determined, all straight-backed and businesslike. She looks forcibly cold, yet House still can't get the image of her collapsed in his arms and smiling like a love-struck teenager out of his head.

He still feels something for her.

He still feels that little spark of energy every time she glares at him with those electric eyes, as blue as the centre of the flame she breathes.

"You need to hire someone, House."

"Mommy, why?" he whines.

"Because you're short staffed."

"Thirteen's coming back."

She tries to be delicate as she reminds him that Chase isn't. Not soon. According to his latest notes, not ever.

"Foreman's stressed. Taub's complaining that he never goes home and God only knows his wife is suspicious at the best of times. I've had her call to check up on him three times in the past two weeks."

"Oh, young love…"

"They're overworked, House, and the fact that you spend less and less time actually on a case than off it is starting to create problems. Chase isn't your only concern, House. Your department needs you."

"They have me."

"If your relationship with the team were a marriage you'd be banished on the grounds of infidelity and neglect!"

"Well, it's a good job I didn't drag any of them down the aisle, then, isn't it, Princess?"

This is not a good day for this. He can only keep the jokes up for so long. The mask has a sell by date. The shield is made only of plastic and it falls apart so very easily.

Those devils, they're tapping and tapping relentlessly, mindless of the Vicodin in his system; defeating it, in fact, because the drug is not infallible and neither is he.

"I understand your position. I know it's tough work being responsible for somebody else but you have responsibilities here, too."

She seems to be purposely oblivious to the strung out look in his eyes, the thin sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Another jolt indicates that Vicodin, indeed, hath forsaken him. It's failed to arrive, just as he wished he had.

"We don't need another team member, Cuddy. We're a happy little family, we three Kings. Of Orient. At times, we even bear gifts."

"It's too much work."

"Oh, hush…"

"It's too much pressure."

"So's interviewing fellows when there aren't enough hours in the day to scour through their bullshit."

"If you don't want to do the interviews yourself then I'll make the decision for you."

He raises his eyebrows. The sensation is like knives in his eyeballs but he doesn't let her see that.

"So domineering. I like that in a woman."

Her humour is at it's wit's end. There is no leeway. There is no rope. The only rope House takes, it seems, is to hang himself with.

"I'm serious, House. This needs to be done."

"Jesus, Cuddy, will you put the whip away? I'll do it, for Christ's sake. It doesn't have to be right this second."

"Then when?"

He shrugs his shoulders. His hands move to his temples as if her words and her voice are giving him a headache.

"Tomorrow. Friday. Next week. Next year."

"I'm your boss. Don't make this difficult. I cut you as much slack as I can but this can't go on any longer. It's not fair on your team - or, should I say what's left of it."

He knows she's right. He knows she's right but he won't give her that satisfaction. Deep down, this has been an issue that's played on his mind, that ultimate decision that had to be made yet would make Cameron's words correct; that Robert Chase is gone, never to return.

That the truth is, he doesn't even want to.

"I'll post the position by the end of the week," she says, all authority, no trace of 'friend' to be seen. House imagines she's taking the firm, no nonsense attitude because she fears the personal involvement.

She speaks to him like an employee because she can't function alongside him as a friend. There's too much between them.

She quietens, now. She feels she's made her point. Cuddy always did that. She always hammered on until she could hammer on no more.

She always chipped away until she knows she has succeeded.

"All I ask is that you shortlist the resumes and get it down to the few we can interview. It's not a lot to ask. It's not difficult."

"Of course not. It's perfectly easy. It's_ child's play_. In fact, why don't you let Rachel choose the person that's going to take his place? That way, you can blame her when it all goes wrong. It's win win for you, isn't it? It's win win for all of us."

The truth is, though, it won't be easy at all. Not for House, not for Cuddy, not for any of them.

Chase, for all his faults, is a hard act to follow.

How could he possibly be replaced?


	47. Chapter 61

**Chapter 61**

"Cuddy wants a new team member," Foreman tells Chase, a gentle indication in his voice as he tries to tread carefully.

He's going in unprepared. Chase can be erratic so it's difficult to say how he'll react to things, whether it be anger, sadness, silence, even. There is no rhyme, no reason. There is no path to follow with this odd, disjointed man.

He nods his head slowly. Foreman is relieved when there's no change in mood, no shifting of plates in preparation for an earthquake.

"I was never coming back, was I? Remy is off on some self discovery journey so she has to do something."

He speaks with a shrug, a 'no worries'. It's so very Australian, a surprising response to Foreman who had thought this might be symbolic for Chase. The finality of the situation is clear as the door closes upon him.

It's like the metaphorical sealing of fate.

"Besides, can you imagine me as a surgeon now? I can't even walk in a straight line. I'd be no good as a diagnostician, either, because I'd forget what we'd already ruled out."

He can be surprisingly chilled in the same way the old Chase was. Some people mistook it for arrogance, for carelessness but it was never that. That part of him hasn't changed. The part of him that would lie and betray to keep his job is long, long gone, though.

"Still," Foreman says, "you have every right to be upset with her wanting to replace you."

"I always get an objective vibe from Cuddy. Sure, she's nice and she's sympathetic but this is business, after all. I thought I'd be dying to get back but like I said to you, I don't think I want to any more."

He almost died and he saw the light. It still shines, perhaps even brighter than ever.

Foreman's relief is visible. Replacing an old team mate is never easy but the circumstances here are so delicate, so fragile that they're almost impossible to deal with.

The fact that Foreman has been anticipating this moment for so long, it feels like a betrayal.

"It's just...I have a few recommendations of my own. I didn't want you to think I was shoving you out of the door."

"It's fine, Foreman, don't worry about it. I couldn't come back even if I wanted to."

He couldn't, not now. Not with a permanent brain injury. He would be too unpredictable, too prone to mistakes. It would be harsh to call him a liability but it might well be accurate. He'd be an aneurism on the hospital's central system; a vessel that could rupture at any time.

Cuddy wouldn't be able to stem the bleeding if something went wrong.

"Get a girl," he says. "Too much testosterone in that room and Taub's already losing his hair."

He runs his hand over his own, softening, now, blonder than it ever was. There are no lines on his face, no marks of stress. There is no indication of anything negative in him at all. Foreman wonders if he would be this accepting or whether his being replaced would be a kick he could not take; a wound he could not stitch.

Sometimes Chase's resilience amazes him.

"I'm glad you're okay with this. There's just too much pressure with the three of us. It's slowly dragging us all down."

"Cutting into your hectic social life?"

"Yeah, something like that."

"We wouldn't want that, would we?"

Chase always seems so full of emotional clarity when he's with Foreman. It's fitting that it took an almost entire personality change on one part for them to become friends but Chase likes Foreman's directness.

It makes him feel like a real person.

"Anyway, I just wanted you to know what the deal was. If House seems a little preoccupied you know why. The truth is, he doesn't think he'll find anyone like you."

"I'm irrepairable."

He means 'irreplaceable' but the word fits regardless.

He smiles.

"Thanks for the heads up."

He puts his hands back on the table and returns to what he was doing before. Back to business, Foreman thinks. They're playing memory with a deck of cards all laid out on a table in the staff room. Foreman is, first and foremost, a neurologist and, though he can be a pal if needs be, he still has to do his job.

"Remember we're looking for pairs, here. King and King. Ace and Ace. The suit doesn't matter."

"I know, I know. It's just…hard."

Foreman finds that Chase understands the basic concept, to try to remember where a matching card might be hiding, but he seems to be forgetting which cards he's already overturned and will repeatedly return to the same ones, deviating only on occasion.

It makes for a frustrating, if necessary game.

"I'm hopeless. We should play snap. My physical reflexes are getting better these days. I'd kick your arse."

"Maybe tomorrow," Foreman says with a smile. "Being paid for card games is a welcome break for me."

"Slacker."

Chase turns over a Queen of Hearts and then a Queen of Diamonds and it's as if he's won a billion dollars in cash. He's not a house of stone, nor is he a house of leaves.

He's something in between.

"Finally!"

"You see? Not so hopeless after all," Foreman says.

Chase smiles, ecstatic, delighted. He doesn't admit to it being pure fluke and Foreman doesn't question it either. Chase just carries on flipping cards over hoping to repeat the feat, random and without pattern, arbitrary and without logic. That's how he functions, now. Without pattern. Without logic. Without foresight. At times, without awareness of consequence.

Like a child, in fact.

It's enchanting yet devastating at once.

(*)

He recalls how to use his phone during some quiet time alone. Phones are small, too small for his fingers, no longer as nimble as they were, but he's starting to recognise the buttons, the menus, the tiny flickering 'icons' that can be touched, moved, pondered, manipulated.

It's all new to him. It's all so…space age, the last 'mobile phone' he remembers being like a brick in his pocket. It was a Nokia. Thick. Useless. Three ringtones to choose from.

Nothing like this…

Part of his rehab has involved putting pictures to words, symbols to their meanings. It seems like a kid's game but Chase has struggled with it at times, unable to logically tie these images to anything at all and in this technological age it's an important 'skill' to master. House bought him an iPhone because it's easy to use, large enough for his awkward fingers to manoeuvre and what's more, there are big, obvious pictures to 'label' each and every function. It offers Chase valuable practice as well as access at his fingertips.

He knows, now, that the picture of the envelope is for messages and e-mails; that the image of the book is for telephone numbers. He also knows that the first letter in the alphabet is 'A', hence the number he is looking for will be one of the first in the list.

There's guilt. There's burning humiliation every time he thinks of how Anton must be feeling, now, having 'lived' through one of Chase's painfully obvious weak spells.

He feels so sorry for him.

Everything Chase does, he proves them wrong. At first they said he might not be able to relate to people; may no longer experience empathy. They said he might not be able to consciously make decisions for the good or for the bad.

They said he might not even speak…

He does all of that, here and now. He makes the decision to call Anton because he empathises with him. He'll speak to him, now, because he understands how he must be feeling. He knows it's a good thing to do.

When he answers the phone, Chase notes that he sounds tired and that, there, is comprehension of sound. Tone.

"Hello?"

"Did I wake you, mate?"

"Chase?"

That's excitement. Surprise.

"Yeah. Thought I best give you a call, let you know I'm still alive…"

"God, Chase, I'm so fucking sorry."

Remorse, check. Relief, check.

"I'm sorry I left you like that. Seriously. I didn't know what else to do. You were flaking out on me. I was scared. I was so fucking scared."

Fear. Terror, even.

"I didn't want to just leave you but…oh, man, I was scared of what was going to happen. My kids…I had to think of my kids, man."

Guilt. Sorrow.

The 'sound' of a good friend.

"It's okay," Chase replies, and he hopes he sounds forgiving. "I understand why you did what you did."

He understands how Anton left him, didn't leave him to die but left him wrapped in a blanket in the safest place for him. They said it was an 'act of criminal proportions' to abandon him the way that he was left but Chase never saw it that way.

He cared about my wellbeing, he argued.

He tried to keep me warm.

He tries to keep me safe.

He wouldn't give them a name when they hounded him for it for fear of getting Anton into trouble and, isn't that foresight? Isn't that thinking ahead?

Isn't that considering consequence?

"I just wanted you to know that I'm fine, Anton. Nothing bad happened."

"You were unconscious. Your lips were turning blue. You looked cold, so I…so I…"

" – it's okay. It happens. It happened. It wasn't your fault, it was mine."

A sad smile as he presses his forehead against the wall.

"I just can't do those things any more."

"Neither can I, Chase. Neither can I."

It's something to admit, that he is weak. It's something to confess, that he is not what he once was; that he cannot 'indulge' the way that 'normal' young men do.

He gets the feeling Anton won't be indulging any more either, irreversibly damaged by the experience Chase had – haunted by it, even.

Anton, the 'criminal', sighs. It's that much-talked-about 'sigh of relief'.

"Thanks, man. Thanks for calling. I've been driving myself insane thinking about it, I really have. You don't know how worried I've been."

He does now.

He does now and it pleases him; pleases him in so many ways to know that he has meaning to people other than those that are required by law to care.

It pleases him to know that he has people in the world that empathise with him when that was something he never, ever felt before.

The world was never empathic to Chase until he lost half of who he was.

He wonders, in this moment, if he'd go back to how it was before, where there was no empathy, where there was no love.

"I'm sorry this happened to you," Anton says, a mirror to Cameron's very words to Chase only days ago.

He answers somewhat differently now that he's had time to reflect.

"Don't be," he says. "I'm not sorry at all. Not any more."

(*)


	48. Chapter 62

_Hey there,_

_Another little snippet here for those that are still around. Having a bit of a crisis of confidence, as is customary with me. I really, really hope I am not boring people to tears. I dunno. Sometimes I guess I just question things. _

_Hope you are all well. Let me know what you think of me kind of going 'Season 7' with this. _

_3_

**Part 62**

"What do you want to be?" House asks over dinner, a bachelor dinner of plates on their laps in front of the TV. There's beer on the floor for House, flavoured water for Chase.

Dessert is Chase's favourite; white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake, just like his grandmother used to make.

"What do I want to be or what did I want to be?"

"Is there a difference?" 

Chase takes a bite of his sandwich. He's gaining weight little by little but the process is slow. House has learned to leave him to it; that his threats don't work and his 'promises' never come through.

He learned from Cuddy that forcing the issue does no good whatsoever; that Rachel will 'eat her greens' when she feels like, not when she's made to. Still, there have been times when House has grown tired of his wayward 'son', has not let Chase leave the table or the couch until he's at least eaten enough to sustain him.

It's only because he cares…

"When I was a kid," House says, "I wanted to be a Mafia boss. I wanted the black car and the suit. I wanted the gun. I wanted a Persian cat and a little Italian slave to pick up after me. Taub comes close but…he's Jewish, and I don't get to carry a gun."

There was a hole in his soul for awhile, an empty space where thought used to be. He was angry and aggressive. He was helpless and pent up.

Blowing people away seemed like a good idea at the time. Catharsis. A way of relieving tension.

He grew out of it, thankfully.

Chase thinks about it for a moment. He bites his lip. He smiles, because his ideas were so far fetched, so ridiculous, but were House's any less so?

"I wanted the obvious. Astronaut. Professional footballer. James Bond. Never doctor, though. Vet, maybe. I liked animals. I remember when Callie injured her paw we took her to the vet and he was so nice. My dad told me that only those that can't deal with people become vets instead of doctors. He made me feel stupid for even suggesting it."

"Not stupid. Smart. Animals bite but at least they don't lie. Steve McQueen was the most honest friend I ever had."

A rat in a wheel that kept him turning, turning. A responsibility. A 'thing' to love, a creature to care for.

Chase reminded him of that poor, sodden rat when he first came out of his coma.

"I guess I don't know what I want, now. Chef? I like to cook. Lifeguard? I'm guessing I can still swim."

He looks puzzled for a moment.

Can he?

"I always loved the idea of working with kids. I like kids. They're straightforward."

"Like little animals, then."

Chase smiles.

"Yeah, I guess that's what I want to do. Something honest. Something worthwhile."

House looks at him with a mixture of pity and hope. Pity, because he might never get what he wants in life, no matter how hard he tries.

Hope – because he hopes with everything he is that the kid does.

(*)

"She looks good."

The picture tells the tale of an insecure thirty-something with tinted hair and a medically altered nose.

She's attractive, if tense.

The two of them are sat at that old glass table in the team's base with some twenty resumes in front of them. There's a pen in Chase's mouth and it's just like old times.

"Says here she finished top of her class in high school."

He says it like it means something. Like it's impressive.

"High maintenance," House argues. "You can tell by the way her lips are pursed like that. She's worried the photo's going to show up her wrinkles. If she's that worried about a photograph how will she do in a life or death situation?"

His powers of observation are second to none. Chase, in turn, just sees a well turned out woman with a decent work history and a love of modern languages.

"She looks nice. She looks like my old geography teacher, Miss Wilmslow."

"Aw, teenage crush? Would-be lawsuit? You didn't sleep with her did you?"

"I sent her a Valentine's card when I was thirteen. I didn't know much about anonymity back then, though, so I signed my name. She was extra nice to me for the rest of the school year."

"Oh, you are such a hopeless case."

Hopeless, ridiculous, yet wholly fascinating. The snippets of Chase that bleed out are House's vice, now, and he collects them like a child collects Beyblade.

"What about this one, then? He's experienced."

Grey hair at the sides. A long face. He looks gaunt; slightly anaemic. House figures he's a vegan by looking at his photograph.

He also figures he's desperate.

"He's old, ergo he's a failure. He's forty years old and he's still pooping around in jobs meant for graduates. He's incompetent. Why would he apply for this position otherwise?"

"Certainly not for your widespread and renowned loveliness."

"Need I remind you that you applied?"

"Apparently I was 25 and fresh from work placement. There's a subtle difference."

House brushes him off with an easy kind of grace. It's smooth, water over rocks, if not a duck's back.

"25. You're not even 25 now, Chase. Who are you kidding?"

Who is he kidding? He doesn't know why he applied. He doesn't even remember filling out the form. He remembers the interview, though, that first meeting stuck inhis mind because it was so meaningful; because it changed him.

He changed again. He still finds himself drawn to Gregory Chase with an intensity that defies comprehension.

"Alright, House. Michaela Bumgardener. What's wrong with her?"

An incredulous look.

"Do you really need to ask?"

"What?"

Faux innocence. He knows. He's suppressing a grin.

He's juvenile.

Just to play along, House spells it out.

"Would she plant seeds in my ass? Grow flowers on my tushie? Need I remind you we work on surname terms?"

"I, for one, would pay to see it."

"With what? Your disability package? Not enough."

"The personal injury money should be in soon."

"I have strict control of that, Chase. I'm buying myself a new bike. I'll get a little sidecar for you, though, don't worry,"

Bumgardener.

The comedy value would only last so long.

"Okay. Kelly Benedict. Good age. Good photo."

She has a tidy smile. Neat hair. A kind face.

"She's pretty. Nice breasts. Pinky and perky. Great smile. A psychiatry specalist, too. Oh, you could rest your pretty little head on her pretty little shoulder, Chase. I could take a picture and use it as this year's Christmas card."

Hand on his heart. Swooning, almost.

"Says here she was the editor of her college newspaper."

"Does that mean she published her naked lesbian pillow fights?"

"No, but she must have guts to do that job. It's not easy. I know I'd find the deadlines difficult."

"Well, that's all relative, isn't it? You find a five year old's jigsaw puzzle difficult."

It's true. So true it keeps Chase quiet for a moment, contemplating the mournful truth.

House relishes that quiet until it ends.

"Brandon Blower," Chase says finally, throwing a photo of a flame haired Prince William onto the table. He's getting bored, losing concentration. They've already looked at this resume. He doesn't seem to recall.

House doesn't even comment upon the name. There is no value in that, he thinks. Repeated jokes just aren't that funny.

Chase sighs. Batch One, it seems, is complete.

"Benedict it is then, Chase. Rather a journalistic shrink with nice breasts than any of the sad alternatives."

House never did hire on merit.

(*)

Her interview is a tough one. House insisted upon Chase being present, that he play an active role in replacing himself. Cuddy had warned House to keep things professional, that this was a job interview not a crèche placement.

Chase wonders what the difference is.

This poor little lamb sits with her fingers pressed together and her head tilted to the side. She answers the questions as fully as she can and she tries her best not to look too flustered when she's challenged.

She doesn't do well with the hypothetical differential but, when prompted, she reaches a correct conclusion. To House, it indicates an unwillingness to think for herself.

Chase doesn't know what it indicates.

"So, you're centred and attentive. Did you learn that online?"

"What do you mean?"

"The body language is forced. Your hands and your head tell me you're at ease. Centred and attentive. Your eyes tell me differently. You've bitten your lip between every question and you've touched your ear three times."

The woman looks edgy. She shifts in her seat.

Chase tries to reel in the tiger.

"She's nervous," he says. "Anyone would be with you biting pieces out of her."

When Chase talks it gives her ideas. She heard about him, the doctor who was almost killed in the explosion; the one who left almost all of himself down underground.

Fearing the worst, she 'uses' him as a way in, as heartless and ruthless as it seems.

Her attention upon him is undivided, now.

"Tenporal lobe damage, right? Possible global brain injury."

Chase says nothing.

"I can tell by your hesitant speech patterns and your grounding techniques. You touch your leg. The back of your neck. It's what you do to keep your mood stable. Dr House explains things to you schematically so you can follow.

"The scar didn't give him away, obviously," House interjects, but he permits her to continue.

"I've worked with a lot of TMI patients. A lot of them develop psychiatric illness and mood disorders, which is where I come into play. Looking at the scar I'd say it was a few months old."

Chase nods softly.

"You're doing well so soon after the injury."

She thinks she's 'cracked it' when he breaks into a polite smile.

Then, House discredits her entirely.

"I'm not hiring you because you're the best for the job or because you can cleverly state the obvious, Miss Blondie. I'm hiring you because Einstein here thinks you're hot."

If ever there was a moment where humiliation becomes tangent and red it's now.

Chase says nothing. There's no confession, no denial.

He didn't even hear.

"You can start tomorrow if you feel you're up to the task."

Poor Miss Benedict wishes the ground would open up and swallow her, just like it did Chase.

(*)

"You were harsh, House. Really harsh."

"Was I any less harsh with you?"

He flickers back to the dream, to the memory – to the one thing that has returned to him with any degree of clarity.

He remember a feeling of nerves. A feeling of drowning. Then, a feeling of success.

"You're never any less harsh with me."

(*)


	49. Chapter 63

_Just another little chapter!_

_Oh, btw, I must point out that in my version of events, House and Stacy were briefly married. I know they weren't but it does refer to Stacy, on my House DVDs as 'House's ex-wife'. They were all-but married. I guess in my version of events they went the full whack and tied the knot. It kind of makes their separation more poignant, to House. His leg cost him a marriage. It cost him his future, in a lot of ways. I think he still wonders what might've been. _

_Oh and I'm paraphrasing with recent episodes. Couldn't find a transcript…_

**Part 63**

(*)

There are some things that House will never fully admit, even to himself.

Sometimes he misses what he once had. Love. Connection. A future. Children, perhaps. A wife that loved him, whose arms were slender and delicate yet could hold his entire world within them with no pressure, no toll.

Often, he dreams of Stacy, her black hair, her warm, almond eyes and long, crescent lashes. He dreams of peeling back those executive layers and finding what was hiding in the centre, warm where the outside is stoic; a caramel centre to a hard shell.

He loved his wife. He still loves his wife. He loves who she once was, looks back in envy at his younger self and the fact that he was loved by such a wonderful woman and, though Cuddy often inhabits his masturbatory dreams it's always Stacy that leaves him silenced.

He awakens in the night sometimes when his eyes are heavy with sleep and his head is laden with dreams. Sometimes, when the moon is right, he will see a silhouette beside him on the white sheets. Perhaps it's his shadow. Perhaps it's his imagination but in those few seconds before he truly comes back to consciousness he will think she is still there. He will groan sometimes. He will smile. Often, he will whisper her name.

She doesn't answer.

He will linger in that moment when he is whole again; when he is whole and in love and when he had a future. It's a lie woven by some ungodly God as some kind of bait to keep him fighting long past the time his heart ceases to be in it.

_There are always moments like these_, that God will be saying. _There can be moments like these again._

_You loved once_, he will hear. _You can love again._

It's not the sexual connection he misses. It's simply the connection.

He will lean across. He will call to her. Then, the light will change and the image will be gone. Hope, love, children, future, all of those things will be taken from him and he will be alone. He will be alone and his bed will be cold and empty where it was once warm and vibrant and full of love, the kind that makes devils cry.

It hurts him to look back, back before his body was a shambles and his psyche was a cluttered mess of defence mechanisms put in place to combat the rest of the world. He has no choice but to surrender to his reality, wrapped in sweat soaked sheets in the dark. Alone.

They say that House is a solitary man – but he never wanted to be just deemed it to be a necessity; a cast fate that doesn't fit him yet he wears like oversized trousers.

It hangs off him.

He swims in it.

He's not alone any more, though. There was another path, another deviation to the series of roads he has walked and will walk.

He opens his eyes expecting to see her beside him. Instead, there is a faint blond head lying on top of the covers dressed in sweats and a t-shirt, sleeping so soundly he's dead to the world. House looks out of the window and he sees that the sky is already white. There is no moonlight. There is no trick of light.

When he calls out the name the figment does not disappear. It remains physical, a thin body and an angelic face that's his, not like Stacy was but his.

His.

There is no sexual connection - but there is connection, just what he's been missing, just what he's been feral without.

House wonders if this is God fucking with his head just that little bit more.

"What are you doing here, Chase? You have your own bed. If you were having nightmares you should've just hugged teddy closer."

"You were yelling in your sleep," Chase mumbles. The figment speaks, its voice so thick and tired it's barely audible. "You stopped the minute I opened the door. I didn't want to wake you but I didn't want to leave you either. "

His eyes open, sleepy, gentle.

"I was only going to stay for a little while. I guess I had a hard time staying awake."

He's sensitive when he says: "I didn't want you to be alone."

Chase knows; knows that House is no isolated creature and that he needs people, too. Chase knows that House often wakes up anxious and in pain, undeniably vulnerable. He's seen it. He's felt it. There have been nights when he has opened his eyes to find House sleeping in the chair next to his bed having quietly let himself in during the night. He will rest there for awhile only to be gone in the morning, a cat seeking out company on its own terms, needing to be close but not touching. Feral animals often seek warmth and company only to scratch and claw when that company acknowledges its presence and attempts to engage it. Chase never engages. Now, though, he makes no move to leave. House feels he's waiting for permission; that he's looking to be sure that his presence is no longer required before he steps away.

House is quiet for a moment as he processes; as he comes to terms with the fact that Chase heard his distress and did not want him to be alone in it. He processes the fact that he would lie down beside him for fear of leaving him to deal with those 'demons' alone.

He decides to make nothing of this for fear of frightening him away, this sprightly boy, this guardian in darkness.

He makes light. He always makes light.

"So, intruder! Do you want your Lucky Charms for breakfast or am I upping your cholesterol at the Golden Arches drive-thru?"

Chase doesn't answer.

The soft, rhythmic sound of his breathing indicates he has returned to sleep.

House frowns as he looks at him, his arms pressed close to him, his knees curled up foetal. Chase doesn't see the conflicted look that crosses House, so uncomfortable in the knowledge that to lose this kid would be as physically gutting as to lose Stacy was; that, had he disappeared like the figment of her so often did it would've left him with a hole in his stomach that he wouldn't have known how to close.

How can he live with that?

How can he live with that kind of attachment to Pinocchio knowing he'll be a real boy again, one day, and he'll have to cut the strings and let him walk for himself?

He wonders if this is what it might've felt like; to fear the future when your children are all grown up and flee the nest as quick as their little wings will carry them.

Chase's wings are still broken.

Chase can't fly, can't run away, can't leave House like he forces everyone else to.

He lies back down and closes his eyes as he listens to the boy breathing knowing that he gave him that life, he gave him that breath.

He is Giupetto to the little wooden boy and that little wooden boy will curl up at his feet if he feels it is what he wants.

He feels himself drifting, drifting with his puppet beside him.

He feels…warmth.

(*)

She still has a pair of her grandmother's glasses. They sit in a cedar box on her

bedside table, keeping close company with a small silver ring she was given for her third birthday.

She holds the ring in her hand and remembers the tiny finger it graced for a fraction of time back when she was a little girl.

Kelly is a sentimental girl full of rituals and sensitivity, the hallmarks of a good psychiatrist. She wears her 'lucky' necklace. She wore this blouse when she was successful in her last interview. She ties her hair back because she feels it makes her look more 'sophisticated' then she pulls it down when she fears it makes her look harsh.

She wears pale lipstick because appearance is everything to her. Still, when she stands at the threshold of House's team's office she's a little girl on her first day of school and her knees are shaking so bad she has to force herself to be still.

All these things are meted out in small measure: reward or punishment. Good luck or bad. She tries to balance everything out in her head, in her body, so that she is stable. Still, she feels like she's being swallowed by this room, by this opportunity.

She holds her breath to stop herself from falling into a spin. Kelly can only stand the tiny increments of exposure of vulnerability. They burn away, they reach too far inside. She cannot allow herself to be slighted, though she knows this 'jump' is a huge one.

It pleases her that Chase is there, a 'mascot', it seems, sat on the couch in the office trying his best to figure out a Rubix Cube. She's forty minutes early and he's waiting for his physio session to begin. He can often be found here in his 'spare time' attempting to read through books that lie on the shelves or getting acquainted with the world through the Internet. It was in his infancy the last he remembers, though reading through his personal e-mails gives him some of a sense of who he was. He receives a weekly 'newsletter' from an Astronomer's website, though he doesn't remember a fascination with the stars. He never felt drawn to golf, either, but his post-count on his particular forum is into the thousands. House teases him, surmises he'll be 'blogging' soon but he doesn't understand the concept of documenting his life to those he doesn't know.

He has a tough enough job with his therapists.

He looks up and smiles, wonders if he'd have a tough time speaking to_ this_ therapist, whose gentle eyes look upon him without pity but with respect, it seems.

She respects what he has achieved.

She respects what he has fought to grasp back.

She feels a warmth from him, a genuine likeability that transcends his brain injury and is perhaps enhanced by it.

"Hey," he says, jovial and very young in a pale blue polo shirt and a pair of combats that look a size too big for his narrow waist.

"Hey. I guess I'm early."

"You scared?"

She smiles.

"I could do with a drink."

"You want coffee? I can make that."

He says it like it's an achievement. He misses the indication that the 'drink' might be vodka straight with a dash of lime.

"Caffeine rush," she says."It'll either make me jittery or it'll help me relax."

"Hmm. Caffeine for relaxation?"

"Starbucks is the root of all pleasure. It's my vice."

"Pushes me close to seizures but it's better than smoking, I guess."

She finds some small comfort where she can sharing honesty and stolen warmth with the man whose job she is taking.

It seems weird.

She feels like 'the other woman' conversing with the wife.

"Here. Have a seat. House is with Cuddy. She's drawing up some schedule that he'll completely ignore. She wants him to ease you in gently but he doesn't believe in that."

"And, you? What are you doing?"

He looks confused.

"I'm making you coffee. Obviously."

"No, I mean – never mind."

She sits down near to where he stands, each drawing something essential from the other. Chase feels as if he is accepting the newcomer and Kelly thinks she is being accepted. She feels she is being welcomed, a reminder of reception and belonging.

"God, I feel like a little girl, here. I've just…I've heard so many things about him. I've heard he's unethical. Harsh. Inappropriate. A nightmare to work for."

"You don't have to be frightened," Chase says, and his voice is relaxing to her. "His bark is worse than his bite. He's an arse but they reckon he's the best in his field."

"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of."

"Why?"

"Because I'm not."

"Your resume was good. Really good. You were the editor of a newspaper. You must be able to handle pressure."

She looks…fallen.

"Editor in chief," she says, softly. "I was editor in chief. I was just a writer. The editor of the newspaper is just called the editor."

She twists that tiny silver ring in her fingers, her own grounding technique. She's afraid for her life, here, for her reputation, for her future.

"Oh. Right."

"You didn't hire me because you though I was editor, did you?"

Chase doesn't answer. She thinks she hears a denial but the only thing that rings in her ears is her own insecurity. She's afraid she's not good enough, her inferiority complex stemming from the fact that she was never the best.

Chase would tell her neither was he…

"Look, you learn how to deal with him. You're a shrink. I'm sure you'll be able to use that to your advantage. As soon as you get used to him he's easy."

Chase would say that. He seeks sanctuary in the arms of House's warped familiarity and sarcastic affection.

To those on the outside House can be a monster of a man. How he'd love to tell Kelly that House was raw last night; that he spent the last night watching over him for fear of him crumbling and breaking like a fractured bone.

"He'll give you a hard time but as long as you stand up to him you'll be alright."

"Any other tips?" she asks quietly. "Seriously, I'm nervous as Hell."

Chase has a fine tuned sense of House's strengths and limits, as well as his needs, his likes, the things that make him tick and the things that send him reeling.

He hands her a mug full of warm coffee, a perfect blend, and as his eyes meet hers they are gentle. Encouraging. He sees the world moving too fast for her, knows she's being pulled along with it when she yearns to be anchored, to be quiet and still.

He sees beauty in her desperation to please for he feels he mirrors that, at times.

He connects with it. So sensitive, he is, when he looks her in the eye. For so long he had a problem with such a simple act.

Now, he overplays it.

There's stunning intensity to him and she finds she can't look away. She finds herself listening to every word he says. Trusting it, somehow.

He wouldn't lie.

He barely knows how to.

"Have your own opinion. Don't bend over backwards. Don't kiss his arse. If you think he's wrong, tell him."

"I will."

"And, play to your strengths."

He smiles.

Chase never smiled at women like this.

He still doesn't know how devastating he can be.

"He never can resist strong, beautiful women."

It's as if he doesn't understand the depth of his words and their meaning; that the smile he is offering her is as innocent as he feels it is.

She tells him "Thank you" but his words stick with her.

Strong.

Beautiful.

She can be those things. She can be those things, she tells herself, trying her best to lock it to mind.

She's sipping her coffee quietly when he finally shows and his first words to her are full of sarcasm; dripping with contempt.

"God, you're hot."

She looks to House, graceless, malevolent.

Then she looks at Chase, benevolent, encouraging, and she stands up straight. Strong, just like he said.

She holds out her hand to him but he doesn't take it.

She falters momentarily then pulls herself together.

"Loving the body language," House says, as he stares her right in the eye. It's quietly aggressive. In a way, it's confrontational. "Straight back, straight shoulders. Head tilted upwards. The only problem is…it makes your breasts look that much more inviting."

She swallows.

She almost falls.

"Knock it off, House," Chase says.

House's eyes do not leave Kelly's face but he says nothing more. Chase, it seems, earths him. He diffuses the bomb. It's a fascinating relationship they have, Kelly thinks, and in a way it makes her feel as if she has the upper hand – or, at least, the possibility of gaining it.

"Obviously, I need to give you the guided tour. What kind of a boss would I be if I didn't show you where all the important rooms were? Canteen. Drinks machine. Smoking area…"

He opens the door but doesn't hold it for her.

She doesn't expect him to.

"Thanks for the coffee, Doctor Chase," she says, as she addresses him over her shoulder.

She uses the title strategically.

If House picks up on it he says nothing.


	50. Chapter 64

_Just a tiny snippet, yes. House and Foreman failing to see eye-to-eye. Also taking total liberties witih the episode. I'm only 'basing' stuff on the episode. Obviously, my characters are different to the ones that exist on the show but there are elements. _

_As always, your words are my encouragement. It's only a small part but, being Home Alone, my mind is on every last noise in the house rather than on the lovely House. _

**Part 64**

House's brightness never shines for Foreman. Not in the way it does for Chase.

He remembers himself ebbing away in that isolation room with his eyes seeing only a white-faced man in a long, black cape with a scythe in his hand. He feels all hope of promotion was lost in those moments, that any little inkling of respect House had for him was lost the minute he didn't succumb. He feels it unfair that the same cannot be said for the pretty rich boy with House's balls in his pocket, it seems - his devoted attention in the palm of his hand.

His head tells him it's not Chase's fault that House puts him first. His heart, it cannot help but resent him for it. He resents Chase's choice; that a young man with no meaningful ability to judge is given the opportunity to extend their team whilst he is expected to simply accept.

He wonders how that is fair? He wonders where the justice is?

He wonders if House takes him seriously at all.

Foreman sent Dr Benedict draw blood and she bungled the result. When asked to give her opinion on a kidney issue she came up with a diagnosis of the liver. She's hopelessly inept and frighteningly out of her depth and, in the same way that every one of Foreman's diagnoses favour neurological, hers disregards facts and goes with simple mental illness.

Psychosomatic.

Psychotic.

She's 'studying', now, a young girl back in 'education' when she should be immersed in the job at hand.

"Why don't you take a break?" House had told her. "You've been here for, ooh, two and a half hours. This must be exhausting for you."

She'd tried to argue her case only to be shot down in flames, the bird with its wings on fire falling to the ground in pieces.

"I suggest you start looking through the A to Z of medical conditions just to get yourself up to scratch. Here's a tip. The first letter of the alphabet is A and the first number is 1. What volume are you looking for, then?"

She'd tried to fight her way into some semblance of calm when she'd muttered out "Volume 1."

Foreman hadn't missed the smile on House's face when he'd seen her stumbling away.

He's leaning against a table, now, doing cat's cradle with that damn yo-yo. Foreman watches his nonchalance, notes that all that's missing is the chewing gum. Then he'd be a real juvenile.

"Didn't I ask you to get a better patient history? I know she's lying. Taub knows she's lying. Even Little Nurse Nancy knows she's lying."

Foreman takes a deep breath. He needs the oxygen. He feels his brain imploding with each and every moment that passes. He's a man of patience but that's long gone.

"You've made your point, House. Nobody can step into Chase's shoes and we're better off alone."

"Is that what you think I'm trying to prove? Damn. And here was me thinking I was doing you a favour by hiring a new fellow. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"Help, House. Not hindrance. She needs carrying. She's holding us back."

"But she's so_ pretty_."

Foreman understands, agrees that Kelly has a pretty face but what else is there to her? What else lies behind that peach-skin and those gentile doe-eyes? Is there a doctor in there? Is there potential hiding beneath this façade of mediocre?

"I can't be there to hold her hand."

"I'm sure there'd be no shortage of volunteers, Foreman."

Foreman had watched the look of relief on the girl's face when she'd encountered Chase on his way to the second floor for his neuro-exam. He'd placed his hand on her arm, gentle comforting, perhaps even over-familiar and she'd heaved a sigh of relief so obvious Foreman could see it from the other side of the corridor. She'd leaned forward, exhausted, emotionally spent, and she'd begun to speak. Foreman learned how to read lips as a six year old following a severe case of glue-ear and Chase's words of soft encouragement were clear even to him.

"_Be yourself."_

"_Don't let them wear you down."_

"_Play to your strengths, like I said."_

He'd been so civil to the woman who was replacing him, so mature, such a man. So young, though. So unaware of how precarious Kelly's position actually was.

"_I'm just so…overwhelmed."_

She'd talked about boundaries, had used the word 'violated' and Foreman had wondered what she meant. Violated by their invasive grilling? Violated by House's persistent niggling questions and degradation of her every thought and idea? He wonders why House hired her in the first place if he was planning to twist her into knots the way he's been doing since the minute she 'clocked in'.

House is smiling, yo-yo still in hand, cane held out in front of him like some kind of wooden saber. Foreman will soon be lost in a mountain of test results whilst Taub repeats others to rectify Kelly's nervous mistakes.

She was brought in to _ease_ the workload, not add to it.

"How long did you interview her for?" Foreman enquires. "How long did you talk to her before you decided she was what this team needed?"

"You're not impressed?"

The look in his eye is mock horror. He appears taken aback but the 'stance' is exaggerated beyond all realms of realism.

"I'd just like to know what brought you to this decision."

"_Chase_ interviewed her for at least forty-five minutes," House corrects placing emphasis on the name. He wants Foreman to be certain that his input was worth less than a man with half of his brain intact. He wants him to be absolutely sure that his meticulous research inevitably meant nothing.

He wants Foreman to squirm. He wants him to succeed, and the only way of doing that is to belittle him. House has learned that Foreman thrives on competition, even when there is none, sort of a 'survival of the fittest' kind of thing. He criticised Chase for foregoing all loyalty with Vogler but the truth is there are no airs and graces with Foreman, either.

He figures growing up in such a tough neighbourhood, Foreman learned to look out for Number 1; to beat off the opposition with a stick.

Chase is no competition for him any more. It may well be why the older man can tolerate him. Or, could.

Now, he just seems like competition again.

"What kind of things did he ask her, House? What her favourite movie was? Who her favourite character was from 90210?"

"Brandon. It has to be Brandon."

Foreman sighs. It's like speaking with a child sometimes, like conversing with a stubborn four year old that can't give a straight answer even if it's life depends upon it.

"Did he ask her any _relevant_ questions, House?"

"He asked her about books, actually. She likes romantic comedies. Her favourite song is from Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' album and her favourite colour is red. Oh, he asked her what her favourite type of wine is too but that seemed to be a meek little afterthought on his part. Is that not relevant?"

He whispers conspiratorially with his hand over his mouth, blocking the sound from travelling.

"Between you and me, I think our little Tin Man has a crush on her. It's kind of sweet. I think he's going to talk to his therapists about her today."

Quieter, still.

"I think he might've dreamed about her last night."

"So let me get this straight. You hired her because Chase thinks she's hot?"

House smiles, affirmative.

"What does cowardly lion think of that?"

The implication that he is heartless strikes hard but Foreman chooses not to expand upon it. He chooses not to snap to that bait even if the hook is caught in the skin of his cheek so fully he can't pull it away.

"What do I think? I think that Papa Chase might've been an idiot but Papa House might well be crazy."

"Touche."

"This is work, House. I know you're into playing games but I had a great candidate. Smart. Bright. Intelligent."

"Are those not the same things? Jesus, Foreman. Did you swallow a thesaurus?"

"I bet you didn't even read her resume, did you? She has six years' experience in diagnostics. She finished top of her class."

"Was she brunette? Chase prefers blondes."

"She was a perfect fit and you didn't even give her a second look. What is that, House? What are you trying to achieve, here?"

The accusation screams between them; that House wanted to sabotage this from the start and that the whole compliance with Cuddy's orders was shambolic.

House taps Foreman with his cane in the midriff.

He's trying to provoke him.

"Is poor little Foreman jealous again?"

"No, I'm just frustrated."

"First you whine that I didn't spend time with you while you were learning how to fasten your shoelaces and now you resent your little brother because he got to choose. I'm sorry, Eric, but Daddy doesn't have to play fair. I don't have to love all my children the same."

"And, what would Cuddy think of this?"

"She shortlisted the applicant. If this all goes badly wrong then I can always blame her. After all, Dr Benedict clearly isn't qualified to be here. You and I both know that. Cuddy told me to make a choice between her shortlisted candidates and I made a choice."

"That's it? You now she's not a good fit yet you're keeping her anyway?"

"At _least_ until the end of the day."

House rolls up the wrapper from his mint and places it in Foreman's pocket. He pats it for good measure, hand over the other man's heart.

"She is pretty, though. Prettier than Cameron. Not as hot as Thirteen but cleaner, at least."

It proves a lot to Foreman that House would prefer to hire a woman because Chase thinks she's beautiful than for actual talent and expertise; that he'd overlook all of Foreman's choices in favour of Chase's simply because he likes him more.

He doesn't see this for the manufactured 'rivalry' that House would prefer it to become.

"You'll thank me in the long run. What better way to make up for a whole day spent staring at Taub's receding hairline than to contemplate just how cold it'd have to be before you'd see Benedict's nipples?"

There is a moment in time when a person realises they're fighting a losing battle.

This is Foreman's moment.

This is the moment in which Foreman realises that nothing he does will ever be good enough; nothing he achieves will ever be respected. He might as well not bother even attempting to breach House; to transcend the sarcasm that acts as a barrier between progress and respect.

House is just a wayward genius that any psychiatrist would be glad to pick apart.

"Go and check on the patient, Foreman. Last I heard she was seeing flames coming from Lady Benedict's ears and tiny horns coming from her head. Either our newest member is the devil or our patient is hallucinating. I know you'd prefer it to be the former but why don't you go and make sure."

If Foreman feels patronised by the tone of House's voice he doesn't make that indication.

He merely walks away; refuses to look back.

After all what, indeed, is the point?

He takes the unprecedented approach of going directly to the source, as pointless as it is, as worthless an encounter as it may be. The frustration is bubbling, the tension reaching breaking point.

He has words he needs to say and House won't listen to any of them.

Foreman knows that Chase will.

He finds him with that same Rubix Cube he's been fiddling around with for days, now, a gift from Taub that had been wrapped up in a silver foil ribbon that had obviously been tied by his wife. It was a gesture out of character yet one Chase had been so delighted with. Taub had smiled at House when Chase dived in headfirst, twisting, turning, trying to match those colours.

"You trying to get into my good books by bringing toys for my kid?" House had asked, mock-playful yet meaning it, somehow.

Taub had smiled that cynical smile and said "Just trying to be a good person, for once in my life."

"What's up?" Chase asks, though he doesn't look up. Foreman stands over him, not threatening but full of intent. Intent to say his piece. Intent to get his point across.

"We're carrying her, Chase. She's deadweight."

"Who?"

"Who do you think?"

Still, Chase doesn't look up. Still, he tries to figure out why the yellow and the red keep switching places when he doesn't recall telling the cube to do that.

"Chase."

Foreman should know better than to try to evade questions with Chase. He still thinks in basically straightforward terms, still finds it difficult to 'read between the lines'. He's working on it but he's so far off the mark he might as well be on another page.

Chase looks up, blue eyes not quite smiling but distracted. Displeased by the interruption. It's like the fabric of life is being ruffled beneath him and he doesn't appreciate that. Not when Foreman can see he's busy. Not when he's asking him cryptic questions he doesn't understand.

"I don't_ know_, Foreman. I don't know who you're talking about. That's why I'm asking."

"_Kelly_.Dr Benedict."

"Then, why didn't you just say that?"

Ignoring the pedantics, Foreman continues. "We've been walking on eggshells all day because she can't even follow a simple task. We've had to re-run God knows how many tests because she's messed up the results and she's incapable of independent thought. Now, I understand she's pretty, but come on, man."

"She said she feels like she's being judged unfairly. Is she nervous?"

Foreman looks confused.

"What? Of course. It's her first day, she's bound to be nervous, but – "

" – but what? Were you perfect on your first day?"

"Of course not."

The cube is placed beside him for the time being. It can wait. He can only focus on one thing at a time, has trouble with multi-tasking as he always did. He's always been easily distracted, now more so.

"You weren't perfect so why are you expecting her to be?"

He sounds so logical, so…straight.

"When people nag on at you you're bound to make mistakes. I know I used to. I don't know much but I know that."

He sounds so right and in that instant Foreman shrinks. His body diminishes by some three feet.

He feels like the harshest man on Earth.

"I know," Foreman concedes. "I know, Chase, but - "

" - Every time I speak to my therapists and they question something I do it makes me feel about two inches tall. Every time I try to put a sentence together on paper and they point out I've mixed up all the words, I panic. I get agitated. I start to feel dizzy and confused. Then I make even more mistakes."

He frowns as he thinks about it, the feeling, the emotion, the inability to hold down the rage.

"If you think you're doing everything wrong then it just makes things worse. If you think people are waiting for you to mess up then you get yourself so worked up that you end up falling on your arse."

How is he so perceptive?

How is he so understanding with the amount of damage done to him? Foreman can't fathom it; can't understand.

It's not a confrontation, here, but there is an air of accusation in Chase's tone when he stands up, so much smaller than Foreman, now, but so much bigger in other senses.

"You're making it worse for her, Eric. How is she supposed to do good if you're constantly on her back?"

Then, he turns a little.

"Are you jumping all over her because you can't jump all over House?"

Foreman feels defensive.

"I'm jumping on her because a patient's life is at risk and she's not doing her job."

Chase smiles, now. He smiles at Foreman's complete lack of compassion. He smiles because he was the one that was supposed to lack empathy and Foreman was the one who told him so.

There's irony there. It's vivid. It's clear.

"You're making her feel small to make yourself feel bigger. Congratulations, Foreman. You're a real boss, now."

His words hit hard. They lacerate. They break through the chest cavity and strike right where it hurts.

The fact that Foreman can't find fault in any of them makes it all the worse.


	51. Chapter 65

**Chapter 65**

Stood here with his arms at his sides, with his leg getting stronger and his mind getting clearer, Chase thinks only "I've survived."

The thought makes him smile to himself, an inward 'congratulations' and a pat on the back that nobody else can see for it's been a struggle; a struggle just to breathe some days when the whole universe seems to be written in a language he doesn't understand and everyone in it seems to be able to communicate whilst he just sails through, not comprehending a word.

One more day he's survived. He's here and he's on the mend. He thinks it's the 'God' in him that makes it feel so meaningful, that little inkling of something deep down inside of him that still values the peace and the quiet of seminary school; that still holds dear the lessons learned in those secretive old walls.

Chase doesn't need much, never did.

Even now, whilst he needs help with the smallest of daily rituals he feels emotional clarity in the very 'act' of being alive.

Chase was taught to be patient. He was taught to be minimalistic. He was taught to appreciate the smaller things in life; a smile, perhaps. A warm, summer's day. The crisp feel of ice and snow beneath walking boots.

He was taught to value what he had, not what he didn't have.

There's not a lot in Chase's life right now – but, at least there is life, and he has learned to value that more than anything, of late, the knowledge that he will awaken tomorrow whereas others are not so fortunate.

He will live another day and there's beauty in that.

For Kelly, life isn't all it's cracked up to be. Life is tough. Life is hard. Life is a series of disappointments all threaded together with this thin fabric that doesn't quite sustain her.

Kelly's life is unfulfilled ambition and the curse of a woman whose need is strong yet whose ability simply doesn't match up. She's suspended in time and hope, a girl who is withered by the mere fact that she is 'disabled' in a lot of ways; disabled by her own 'average-ness' and by the fact that her ability could never live up to her face.

Whilst Chase smiles at the mere fact that he is alive, Kelly wants to cry at the simple truth that she doesn't feel as if she is, burned and humiliated and taught a valuable lesson about her own limitations today, her first and last day.

Not even Foreman's renewed sense of 'acceptance' and 'encouragement' could turn this around, nor could Taub's promise that it would get easier as the days went by. Neither man could take away from the fact that Kelly Benedict is a freshman swimming amongst graduates; a kid with a High School Diploma trying to 'slum it' alongside those with a Master's Degree.

Who had she been kidding?

Who had she been lying to but herself?

The patient was schizophrenic. She, the 'master psychiatrist', couldn't even properly pinpoint it. She, the humanitarian, hadn't thought that her offer of comfort in the form of a blanket could've been such a stupendous mistake.

She. the manipulator, who had intended on using her 'ability' to wrap House around her little finger, realised her 'ability' meant nothing at all.

She looks so forlorn, now, a deer that's bypassed the headlights and has crashed head-first into the vehicle. Her confidence is askew. It doesn't fit her any more. It's crumpled, like an old tramp's coat, yet she wears at as she might wear a crown of thorns.

"I never made it," she says to Chase, he the charming puppy that's followed her into the locker room hoping for a gleeful recollection.

"He fired you?" 

"No, I quit."

He doesn't judge her. He doesn't question her. He doesn't even have the indecency to look surprised. Instead he just looks to the ground and says "Oh."

"You don't have to feel sorry for me. I knew this was coming. This was like Ugly Betty going in for the Miss Universe contest. I was so far out of my depth that I couldn't even tread water."

"Was it that bad?"

"Worse. Believe me, it was worse. His lines are all over the place. I'm not the kind of person to cross them. I'm not the kind of person for him."

To her, it's hard to believe that Chase is; hard to believe that a man so predominantly 'nice' could ever find himself embroiled in the sadistic world of Gregory House.

She leans against the locker, the first and last time she'll visit it, and she sighs.

"I just wish things could've been different, you know? I learned a lot about myself today."

"Like what?"

"Like…the fact that I need to learn to stand up for myself. The fact that I can't lie to myself any more."

She smiles sadly.

"The fact that I actually suck as a doctor…"

"Hey, don't say that," Chase argues, hating to hear the put down in that voice; the self-flagellating tone that doesn't suit her pretty face. "Sure, you might not've fit in here but there are other places. There are other jobs."

"I don't know…"

"I'm serious. Just because you haven't succeeded this one time doesn't mean you never will. God, if I gave up every time I failed I'd still be in a chair with wheels and I sure as Hell would've have become a doctor."

He screwed up, too. Constantly.

He messed up, just like she did.

She smiles. It doesn't reach her eyes but it's a start.

"You're sweet –"

That's all? He wants to be more.

" – Sweet. Yeah, I'm sweet."

He wants so badly to be _able_ to be more to this woman, _any _woman. He sees that look of defeat in her eyes and he wants to take it away, to extract it like a surgeon might but with softness and delicacy.

He wants to take that pain from her eyes but he can't.

He can't, and it frustrates him.

All he can do is offer her kind words; a softening of the blow, in some way.

"You did your best, Kelly. I knew you would."

It doesn't help.

"Yeah. Who was I kidding? I knew I wasn't cut out for this."

She folds her arms across herself, tries to keep herself in check.

She looks close to tears.

Chase bites his lip, desperate, in a sense, because he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what she needs. He doesn't know what's required of him. He feels like he needs a manual for this sort of thing, a few little pointers on how to respond; how to behave.

He wishes he knew.

"Kelly," he says softly, imploring her to be quiet.

It's clichéd, the way he reaches up and places stray hair behind her ear. It's a scene from a movie, scripted and played out, and Chase is his favourite actor playing the part.

"It's not all bad," he tries.

She laughs softly, bitterly, as he tells her not to worry.

She feels coy. Pathetic. She doesn't even feel like a failure because she knew this was too much for her. She knew the moment would come that she was exposed for what she is; a girl who wants too much and forever reaches out of her comfort zone.

They can't fault her ambition, that's one thing.

"You know, I thought I could do this for a second. I really did. I thought I saw his weakness and I had every intention of exploiting that."

Exploiting that. Exploiting him. She doesn't tell Chase that he was the weakness and he doesn't ask.

He looks sympathetic as he nods his head.

It makes her want to cry.

"He's not for everyone, that's for sure."

That's one way of putting it, she thinks, as she tries her best not to sink any further.

She smiles as she pats his hand; as she offers him her gratitude in an informal, physical manner.

"Thank you," she says. "Thank you, Chase."

Her voice breaks a little.

It breaks him, too.

"You've been nothing but nice to me and I wish..."

_I wish..._

She doesn't complete the sentence, doesn't know how. She doesn't know how to tell him she wishes things were different; wishes they had all been like him. Wishes, perhaps, that he wasn't as 'broken' as he is because maybe then she could've taken him from this, at least.

She can't say those words. Instead, she kisses him on the cheek. It's chaste. Chaste, for Chase. She can practically feel it coming from him, the desperation to get out what he truly wants to feel, what he truly to be.

How sorry she is for this man that can offer so much – but, at the same time, can offer nothing at all.

"The parts of you that don't work so good don't matter, Dr. Chase. You'll be some man when they do. You already are."

It could be patronising, should be but somehow it isn't.

Somehow, it just makes him ache.

He stares at her, the little cogs in his brain fighting to work, to process, to react. He touches his face where her lips were and she watches him do it. He can still feel the warmth and the pressure of that kiss.

In a way he looks sad. He didn't think he needed much – but there's a 'need' here that's pushing him close to breaking point and it's as irrational as when he was a boy of thirteen lusting after his teacher.

She seems older, so much older than him…

"Thank you," she says again, and he longs for more.

"You told them to be nicer to me – so, thank you for trying, at least."

"S'okay…"

His voice can barely be heard above the beating of his own existence.

He licks his lips. His throat feels dry, drier than it ever has and he wonders if it's a psychosomatic response .He wants to reach out and pull her forward. He wants to throw her against the lockers here and now. He wants to hold her. He wants this irrational physical response to her mere presence to have a meaning, to have a beginning, to have a middle, to have an end.

He wants more. He wants something.

He doesn't know what.

His hand reaches out as she turns her back to him. It's like he's trying to touch the moment, like he's trying to feel something physical in the space she has left between them.

It hurts him.

He wants to kiss her again, wants the kiss to be more. The feeling overwhelms him as his thick, high stumbling block pokes him in the head and reminds him why this is all he can get.

_Why would she want you? You're damaged._

_Why would she look at you? You're just a little boy, now, weak and forlorn. _

He wants to take this physical attraction and make something of it, wants to ask her to dinner. To a movie. To a long walk in the park.

He wants to be her 'consolation prize'; something good and worthwhile to take away from a bad experience.

He can't. Not like this.

Not with this hole in his brain that's ten years wide.

Instead, all he can do is watch her walk away, wishing above all things that those seminary teachings extended to this.

"Take care," he whispers, overwhelmed, heavily affected by this 'lost' opportunity, perhaps the first of many.

House finds him sat next to that very same locker some two hours later. He hasn't moved. He's barely even breathed. Instead he's fallen asleep with his head against the coldness of the metal mourning the loss of the first person he's felt a 'spark' for.

The older man taps his young 'charge' with his fingers.

"Earth the Chase. There's a couch in my office if you want to catch some shut-eye. I wouldn't let the others draw on your face in marker. I promise."

When he opens his eyes he looks like a teenager.

House sees the sadness before he senses it. Visual cues always come before the emotional for this man.

"She's gone," he says, two simple words that state the obvious yet at the same time express so much more.

"Into thin air," House concedes. "Not quite out with a bang but with a fizzle and a groan."

He understands that Chase is implying something deeper, here, that the 'loss' has hit him in a way that House could never understand.

He knew Chase had that little boy crush on her; that little 'thing' where his eyes lit up the moment House said he'd hire her.

He knew he'd hoped, perhaps irrationally, for something.

It's as if Kelly is an archetypal image to the boy; a representation of all of the women he will not be able to touch; all of the potential lovers that might've looked twice at him before yet not now.

Never now.

He knows he should say something; to indicate that things will get better, perhaps, but he doesn't know what to say. Instead, he says three words that will perhaps come back to haunt him one day but they're the only word she can find at this present moment in time.

"Talk to Wilson," he says.

Talk to Wilson. He knows all about unrequited love.

Talk to Wilson. He's forever pining after women who will never see him as more than just a puppy on the end of a leash; a pet to stroke and cuddle yet nothing more.

Chase says nothing more on the subject. He doesn't judge, doesn't question. He doesn't argue, doesn't moan.

He looks sadder than House has ever seen him look, though, and it irks him, a little.


	52. Chapter 66

_Hello All. Hope you are all well. _

_I'm doing my usual and second guessing myself all the time. I thank all of you who take the time to PM/review/whatever. You don't know how much it helps me. _

_Thank you to Cajun Shadeux for your lovely PM. For some reason it won't let me reply to it. I don't know why but it's simply not shifting when I try to do so. I just want you to know that I always appreciate your little feedbacks and you can be rather inspirational, if you know what I mean. You're right about Chase spiralling down a little. He might push too hard but he'll come good in the end. _

_To everyone else – thank you all for being around. It does mean a lot. _

_xxx_

**Part 66**

Chase wonders why House abandoned him to Wilson when Wilson's words are this…abstract, like the centre of a greetings card or the middle of a fortune cookie.

"This is life", he says. Grasp it. Sense it. Touch it. It stings, sometimes. It pricks and hurts. Other times it strokes, feather light. It unwinds. It arouses.

"Life's terrifying", Wilson says, and Chase doesn't know where the words come from when he absently murmurs "Be not afraid!"

The 'philosopher' flinches a little, reels from the meaning of those words. He lived with the humiliation for weeks until it all died down but even now, he still finds pictures of fairies in his locker; leaves slipped under his office door.

"You're not going to talk about forest nymphs, are you?"

"Forest what?"

Part of him wonders whether House has sat his puppet down and taught it how to mock but Chase seems totally unaware of what he's said so Wilson doesn't push it. He just listens; listens as Chase expresses his deepest, darkest fears: isolation, loneliness, abandonment, lovelessness…

"I've been lonely all my life," he says, though he doesn't expand upon those words. "I don't want to be lonely forever."

He was lonely as a boy, with absent parents and a life of change, lonely as a young man with a sick mother and an ill-fitting family, no time for friends, no time for life. He was lonely as an adolescent with Susan Chase dead and Rowan offering nothing but emptiness, lonely as an adult because his experiences with 'love' were all-but positive and left him rather damaged.

Chase never had many friends. Now he has friends a-plenty but is that out of pity? Do these people 'care' because he's Humpty Dumpty? They're all King's horses and men, after all, but putting him back together again is taking some time, too much time…

"It's all going too slowly."

Wilson sighs. It's a sympathetic sound but Chase wonders if he's simply tired of him.

"You're doing great."

"I'm doing _nothing_."

"That's not true. You're keeping House in check for one thing. You don't know how much of a better man he's been since he had you."

'Had' you, he says, as if Chase is something to be 'had'. Had. Owned.

Owned and then abandoned on a side-road when he wasn't working so well…

"I must mean so much to him when he hands me over to you at the first sign of a problem."

It's a strange new world for Chase. Wilson sees it. Feels it. It's intoxication. For Chase, it's like waking up after too much vodka and too little memory of what happened last night.

The hangover is immense, aching with the feelings of guilt, of confusion, of that itching, pressing fear that he's done something wrong; said something out of place.

"House is…House," Wilson tries to explain. "House always ran away from emotions. It doesn't mean he cares any less. He just doesn't want to make things worse by saying the wrong thing."

It's not true, not really, but to Wilson it's better for Chase than the truth as he sees it – that House doesn't want to wipe tears away, that his 'love' stretches far but it has its limitations.

"He realises I have a pathetic track record with women so I guess he felt I'd be able to relate, somehow. I've pined after women before. I've spent my nights alone on the couch when all I wanted was a woman's touch."

His self-deprecation can be grating. It can also be charming.

If nothing else, it's disarming.

Chase twists a small silver ring around his little finger and for a moment Wilson fears he's going to put it in his mouth, giving in to the oral fixation that House would often refer to as a 'Freudian dream'.

"I feel like there's no hope for me, now. I wanted to be a dad one day. I wanted kids. I wanted a wife but that clearly didn't work out. Now what chance do I have? Who wants an extra child to take care of?"

He certainly can't be trusted to take care of himself. They had to appoint House and, though he appreciates all the man does for him it's simply not the same of having a loving embrace to fall into; a mountain of curls to bury your face in. Ever since he realised that one girl could not look at him in 'that way' things have all come crashing and tumbling down upon him, hitting him with such force that the pain is almost physical.

"It feels like the end of the world?" Wilson asks.

Chase nods.

"She's just one girl."

"Yeah, but it all means so much more. Lets not beat around the bush, who's going to want me in this state? One of the nurses put her hand on my shoulder when she was examining me earlier on. I wanted to kiss her. Jemima on reception told me she liked my shirt and I started looking at her in a completely different light. God, even Cuddy…"

Even Cuddy brought him to some kind of state, not quite arousal but_ something_.

He can't moderate. He can't regulate.

He could fall in love ten times over and it would amount to nothing.

"The only thing that all of these women have in common is that_ none_ of them would look at me in that way. Not one."

The feelings he is having are adolescent. They're akin to the hormone induced 'love' a fifteen year old boy might have for Pamela Anderson; for Angelina Jolie. It_ feels_ like love. Wilson remembers it well, remembers falling in love with everyone he met and feeling that sickening sense of 'loss' each and every time his 'loved one' walked away.

It's difficult to process. It's hard to cope with.

So many songs have stemmed from all of this and House claims that Wilson wrote them all…

He tries to appeal to him on some kind of physiological level. He tries to give him a reason for these feelings, though he knows deep down there is no logic to any of it.

"Did you know that one theory on the extremity of a teenage crush is to prepare them for the real thing? They might look at a picture in a magazine and feel the same pang that a man feels when looking at his wife. Sure, it hurts like hell when the object of our 14 year old affections doesn't requite our feelings but it prepares us for the real thing. The whole world is intense."

It's amplified like the heat of a thousand suns. Fifteen year old boys are not equipped for real love; for true emotion.

Neither is Chase.

"I'm not fifteen."

"No, but your feelings are affected by what happened to you. Your thought processes are affected. Your moods are unstable and you find it hard to switch off."

"I find it hard to do anything."

"Your emotions have been affected so you're feeling everything in the same way a teenager might, with this huge, life-changing intensity that isn't real but it _feels _real. It's screwed up."

"_I'm_ screwed up. I never said I loved any of them, James. I just said that I felt…something."

"Of course."

"Kelly - I fancied her, I guess. I would've liked for her to notice me for reasons other than the scar on my head. House said you'd know all about that."

Chase sighs.

"It's just…hard."

Hard watching the world move on whilst he stays still. Hard watching other people fall into happiness whilst he remains on the periphery looking in because everybody's frightened to touch him.

He wanted Kelly to see him as a candidate in the same way as he put her forth as one. He wanted her to look at him with that little pang of 'want' that he felt towards her.

His disappointment is brutal. The implication of what this all means for him, that's like a tumor that's growing before Wilson's eyes and he feels if he doesn't 'catch' it soon it'll metastasise.

House can't be Chase's chemo, can't 'cure' him of this.

Only words can. Only time.

"Give it time, Chase," he says. "Don't rush it. Know yourself first before you try to know anyone else. You're doing better than anyone ever anticipated but you can't run before you learn to walk."

"And, if nothing changes?"

It's like a cancer patient asking: _"what if the tumour doesn't shrink?"_

Wilson gives the same advice here; the same advice he gives any patient with a diagnosis that's less than certain and whose future is hazy at best.

"If nothing changes then we evaluate. We try to salvage what we can. We try a different tact to see if we can garner a better result."

His tone is so terminal, though. He is gifted with the gentleness of a man born to break bad news. Chase senses it and it sends him even further downwards.

He feels as if Wilson's trying to soften the blow.

"I've seen the improvement in you. We all have. We've all seen you slowly coming back. You should be proud of what you've done. There's nothing to say that things won't get better."

"Except that it might not."

Wilson smiles encouragingly.

"You were never defeatist, Chase. Don't let that part of you change."

Chase tries his best to draw from it but it's hard to reciprocate a smile when everything in him is crying; aching with a deep sense of loss that makes no sense to him.

"The girls will wait. They'll still be there next week, next month, even next year, if that's how long you need. My God, if that experimental speed-dating is anything to go on you've nothing to worry about whatsoever. You just have to take it slow."

Take it slow.

How tired Chase is of 'taking it slow'…

(*)

"Did Wilson tell you all about his long lost loves?" House asks, as he drives Chase home. "He's a puppy dog. They want to stroke him and feed him treats and all he wants to do is hump their leg."

He tries to make light though he knows this is dark.

He tries to paper over the cracks but he knows there's more to it than that.

"He told me to take it slow," Chase replies, though his voice implies a dismissal; an unwillingness to take the words for what they represent.

"Good advice, considering the fact that you couldn't possibly give a woman what she wants in this state."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

House shrugs.

"I don't want you humiliating yourself before you're ready to handle rejection. You'll come over all weepy and pathetic and I'll have to be your shoulder to cry on."

"Or, just send me to Wilson, right?"

"He's better at it than me. He's as pathetic as you are when it comes to fawning over worthless idiots with breasts."

Again, there's brutality in that honesty but House feels it necessary. He sees the look on Chase's face. He senses the black hole he's looking to fall into if he's not snapped back. It's deep, so deep. So deep it'd be hard to claw out of it and he doesn't want the boy hurt. Watching him lose it over some worthless woman might've been a bloodsport before but now he feels Chase needs protecting from that.

He'd do it if he could.

"What if I _want_ an idiot with breasts? I always hated being alone."

He implies it's what he's fearing.

House never bothered to identify that.

House is quiet for a moment, contemplating his next words. He tries to choose them carefully. He tries to calculate the balance but finds himself walking the fine line between hateful and insulting.

He finds this difficult, all of it.

He finds Chase difficult…

"You can barely figure out a crossword puzzle any more, Chase. What makes you think you can figure out a woman? They're hard. They're trouble. They're not worth the time and effort it takes to try to crack their code - and I don't mean that as a euphemism for sex, however much it sounds that way."

Women _are _hard. Women _are_ difficult.

Chase just isn't ready for that kind of a headfuck.

"You're not ready," he says, and there's sensitivity in that. "Trust me, I don't want you messing yourself up for a quick kiss and cuddle that'll mean so much more to you than it actually is."

He's actually saying '_I don't want you to hurt yourself' _but Chase hasn't the ability to 'de-code' that.

"Just forget it," the young man says as he stares out of the window. "It really doesn't matter."

"Clearly it does, otherwise you wouldn't be tripping over your bottom lip about it."

"I said it doesn't matter, alright?"

It does, though, it matters more than he could ever describe. He can't explain to House how he sees only fog, mist and blackness in his future. It's like something's been removed from him; something that isn't simply brain tissue but more. He can no longer hear the laughter of his children; can no longer feel the slight pressure of gold around his finger.

He feels every hope he ever had slipping away from him but he won't let that happen. He won't let those things be taken from him, just as everything else has been.

They complete the rest of the journey in silence.

If he were to be completely honest, House comprehends the feeling of being unlovable. He understands the thought of any woman looking with pity rather than lust because for so many years he lived it. For so long he was the poor cripple, the handsome, disabled man who could've been so much.

He was the bitter, twisted bachelor with the bum leg and the empty bed. Then, he simply stopped caring.

One of the reasons House behaves the way he does is that nobody can pity a sharp, strong-willed man. Nobody can look upon the 'cripple' as disabled if he can strike them down with a mere structure of words. He drives the bike because it's his way of maintaining masculinity. He can't be so crippled if he can tear it on a motorcycle; can't be so helpless if he can tread danger that way. He didn't take up the offer of a beautiful young woman in Cameron because she focused on his disability rather than seeing beyond it. She wanted to 'fix' him, whilst he likes to believe there's nothing to fix.

She appealed to the part of him that he betrays; that he resents and defies.

The reason Chase was always his favourite was because he never did. House doesn't want 'mothering' – and, neither does Chase.

They need something more.

"Listen to Wilson," House says finally after the engine has died away and the journey has ended. "I didn't palm you off on him because I don't give a damn. I did it because I knew he was the best person for the job."

Just like Wilson said, he only does what's best.

Just like Wilson claimed – even his dismissive behaviour has a deeper meaning.

"Thank you," Chase replies.

Thank you, he says, but House isn't sure he means it.


	53. Chapter 67

_Again, thank you to all those that chose to leave me a message. Much appreciated, as always._

_Bit fluffy in parts, this one, but it is nearly Christmas…_

_Oh, and House will choose Chase over everyone, it seems. _

**Chapter 67**

She appears, a visitor in the night with a low cut top and long black curls. Her eyes are sapphires in midnight, deep blue, curtained by thick black lashes. Her nose, prominently Jewish, is sidetracked by the sweetness of her smile.

She doesn't know why she chooses to make an effort for House but it's always her way, though she'd never dream of admitting it's taken her almost an hour to prepare for an impromptu visit to a man she claims she doesn't love.

Chase, 'manning the fort' whilst House showers, answers the door in his stocking feet, a pair of loose fitting sweat-pants hanging limply over his heels. He has a spoon in his hand, a tool with which to devour the 'feast' of Rice Krispies he has limited himself to for this evening's dinner and what little hair he has proves to have a mind of its own as it vies for attention with the bright coloured t-shirt he has plucked from House's washing basket.

The 'vision in blue' takes him in with the charming grace of one who knows not to laugh at his dishevelled state for fear of ruining the calm he seems to hold, right now.

"Chase," she says. "Is he home?"

Chase scratches the back of his neck as if he's been asked a difficult question.

She asks him again only this time more specifically. She doesn't know how far he's progressed with indirectness but according to Foreman he's a stickler for names.

"House. Is House home?"

"I, uh…he's…he's in the shower. We weren't expecting company."

We.

The word implies a togetherness that Cuddy can't even imagine.

"I'm sorry. Is this a bad time?"

The blush is pink-turned-scarlet, a telling sign, a raise in blood pressure that paints him pretty.

"No, but…well, I would've got dressed, for one thing, if I'd known you were coming."

He doesn't look his best but at the same time he looks charming. Effortless, with his huge blue eyes and that seemingly permanent 'little boy lost' look that he wears so well.

Cuddy smiles that hard-wearing smile of hers as she paints the truth in black, white and gold.

"If you'd been expecting me he'd have turned off all the lights and had you sat in silence until I went away. He's a tough man to pin down, especially these days."

"Yeah, I guess."

He just stands there. The cues are missing with Chase and, despite the coldness outside he doesn't progress with an invite.

Cuddy pushes for fear of this stalling entirely.

"Can I come in? It's freezing out here. Plus, Rachel…"

She smiles uncomfortably as she indicates her sleeping daughter, the child Chase did not see, the 'being' he failed to notice in a bright green stroller whilst he tried to take in Cuddy's eyes, her face, the cut of her top beneath a half-buttoned jacket…

There are no words as he steps aside, opens the threshold and permits this woman and her child into the 'comfort' of their humble abode.

"I was just eating dinner. I'm sorry for the mess."

There's a half eaten bowl of cereal on the table, a glass of milk that's two-thirds full. There is no mess aside from sneakers on the floor and a well-worn TV guide crumpled up beneath the cushion. Cuddy appraises the scene, pitiful, bachelor-esque, only Chase isn't a bachelor, not any more. Not in the general sense.

"That's dinner? Chase, come on. You're supposed to be building yourself back up not living off convenience food."

She tries to imagine House as a father, shoving his 'son' in front of the television with a bowl of rice or a microwave dinner whilst he attends to his own needs elsewhere. She tries to imagine doing the same to Rachel.

She hates to think of Chase as neglected…

"Don't worry," the young man says, seemingly sensing her thoughts. "I just didn't feel like eating today."

"You're not feeling well?"

He's not really, though it's not physical. The idea of a 'tomorrow' without love will turn a person lethargic and effortless; devoid of basic need and desire for sustenance.

"I just…lost my appetite, I guess."

"Well, as long as you're taking care of yourself. If this appetite is a long-term thing you need to get it checked out."

She doesn't expand upon the fact that he's had issues with this for a long time, now, trusts House to do what's right.

She doesn't know why she trusts him at all.

Chase smiles a faux-tolerant smile as he whispers "Yes, Mum."

"So, did you have plans? I'm not interrupting, am I?"

"No, not at all," he lies, though he hasn't quite grasped the art of lying and it's painfully obvious that he's shielding the truth. He and House were going to watch a movie tonight only now there's Cuddy and, as beautiful as he finds her, in this moment, he can't help but resent her presence.

He tries his best to appear civil. Friendly, even.

He tries not to show how much her presence is putting a spanner into his carefully cultivated 'works'.

"It shouldn't take long," Cuddy promises. "Besides, I have to get back with Rachel. The babysitter got sick and had to leave early and I don't like having her out past her bedtime."

She mentions routine and Chase understands entirely. He's upset that his routine is being hampered also. In the bedlam of his existence, he needs to know what is coming; what will happen. He can be driven to panic with even the slightest deviation from his 'norm', sent into a spin if his therapy session begins late or ends early.

He's trying to make sense of his world and when people try to dislodge him from his path it makes him so frustrated...

For Cuddy there has to be leeway. There has to be flexibility. It's difficult juggling motherhood with the necessity of her vocational 'baby'.

House might say the same of 'fatherhood'…

"What did you want him for anyway?" Chase asks, enquiring as to what urgent need necessitates interrupting their evening. "I thought home time was supposed to be home time."

"Home time is never home time in this profession, Chase."

_You used to know that,_ is what she doesn't say.

"It's just work stuff. You wouldn't – "

" – I wouldn't understand? I wouldn't be interested?"

Now he sounds quietly agitated. Bitter, in a sense. Cuddy forgets she's walking on eggshells with this kid, this child.

With this insecure boy where a confident man once was.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't mean you wouldn't understand. I didn't mean you wouldn't be interested, either. It's just – well, you wouldn't know anything about it. It's all presentation stuff. It's stuff you didn't deal with when you worked at Princeton Plainsboro."

And, just as he reached a high he crashes again.

"Oh. Right."

He's embarrassed, now. He jumped ahead without thinking.

"I'm sorry. I'm just - "

" - It's perfectly fine."

"No, it's not."

He tries his best to disarm. The clothing and the hair, they help paint the picture of a hopeless youth…

"I just get tired of people dumbing everything down for me. Sometimes I _do _understand. They just assume I don't."

She understands. She understands his misplaced anger and his constant confusion. She understands his hurt at being unable to function in the ways he once could and the feeling that those around him see him destined to fail.

She understands he resents those that don't see him as capable, understands because she understands head injury – not because she comprehends on a personal level.

In a way, she doesn't understand at all.

She_ does_ understand that Chase was and always will be a thoughtful, sensitive guy and that this, all of this, is harder on him than it would be on many others.

"He should be out in a minute. He's been taking showers instead of baths lately. Reckons it's getting harder to climb out of the tub."

"His leg?"

Chase nods.

"I guess I'm a physical burden as well as a mental one."

"Well, House's pain is psychological in a lot of ways. If he's got something to take his mind off it then all is well. The minute he gets those moments alone to stop thinking? It hits him full force."

"You know."

"I've seen it. You're not the only one with a problem with your head, Chase."

It gives the boy food for thoughts. Cuddy watches as he feeds off it, as he takes that thought away and analyses it the best he can.

She watches as he makes the realisation that he's not alone, that House often suffers as much as he does because his brain doesn't interpret things the way that it should.

It consolidates them in a lot of ways.

It gives them a certain brotherhood that nobody else can be a part of.

Cuddy watches as Chase tries to distance himself form her out of that residual fear he's upset her because that, above all things, is something he cannot bear. It's never been part of who he was and, whilst he has always had those tiny little fragments of self that were on a wavelength with House he's never sought pain from others.

Chase has always been a doctor who sympathised where it mattered; who drew from his own experiences if he thought it might help. She always found it funny that he could be so open to a complete stranger whilst he was so closed off to those who were a part of his daily life. She asked him about it once only for him to shrug and tell her "It's easier to confess to a man behind a wooden slat because he's not the one that's judging you day in, day out."

He meant it was easier to open up to a stranger, one that does not know and will not question long term.

"If telling patients things about myself will help them trust me more then I'm all for that. I don't see what purpose it serves to tell my colleagues."

He didn't want friends. He did crave trust, however – did open himself up to those that would value it, to those that would not judge.

Children don't judge.

Children don't lie.

Chase always preferred the company of children because they have such an honesty about them. Even when they lie there is no real malice.

He crouches down on the ground as he acknowledges Cuddy's awakening daughter, the daughter he played with at the hospital charity ball, the little girl he swung around until she giggled with glee and begged for more, more, more. House had called him an idiot, then, and had likened his maturity to that of a three year old.

Cuddy had called him sweet, marvelled at the sincere way he could get down to a child's level and truly understand them. She called him a treasure in that sense, a real father-in-the-making.

She feels sad for the fact it's something he'll never be, now.

"Good morning, Princess," he says softly as the child blinks slowly in his direction. He reaches up and gently touches the necklace that rests around her neck. "That's pretty. Is it you?"

It's a child-fairy made of silver with a painted pink dress and little ballet shoes on its tiny feet.

Rachel nods slowly, understanding his every word, and her three-year-old eyes see nothing but Robbie in the man before her.

She sees no difference.

She sees no mountains to climb, no eggshells to walk upon.

She sees the man that smiles at her whenever he sees her, the man that reads her books in the staff room and builds brick houses for her to knock down and build back up again.

She tells him she's thirsty, asks for apple juice in a big girl's cup and, though her mother has it tucked away in her travelling bag she doesn't stop Chase from fetching it himself.

It's a purpose. It's a job. It's a responsibility.

It's something Rachel asked him to do, not Mommy.

He crouches down again as he hands her the cup. It's yellow. Plastic. It's one he brought with him from his own place that he and Cameron used to use for outdoor 'barbies', Aussie style.

House thought it useful for Chase whilst he re-gained use of his hand.

"There you go," he says softly as tiny hands lift that big girl's cup up to tiny, solemn lips. "With an umbrella, just the way you like it."

He remembers that.

It doesn't occur to him that he remembers but he does.

He's preoccupied with tales of 'Emmy' and 'Leelee', the girlish names of two stuffed rabbits, when House finally emerges, unaware of the company and in a poorer state than Chase is.

He's naked but for a small pair of shorts and a towel around his shoulders, though he has the decency to tell Cuddy to look away when he notes her presence.

Under his breath he mutters that it's nothing she hasn't seen before but there are times and places for exposures and this is not one of them.

"Make this fast, whatever it is," House tells her. "Chase and I have plans and we don't need you and the twins interrupting those plans."

He looks down as he says those words.

There's no discretion in him at all.

(*)

They talk.

They talk about plans and reports, figures and presentations. They talk about the overall running of the hospital, the highs, the lows, the strong and the weak points.

She pores over progress and decline as she tries to identify ways in which they can run more efficiently. House listens because she gives him no other option and, though his input is minimal she appreciates his contribution.

All the while she can't take her eyes off Chase and her daughter sat on the rug building towers out of letters and numbers. Rachel laughs then squeals. The sharp hitching of her tiny voice causes Cuddy to tense up and, as the tower topples over it leaves her edgy and anxious.

"Be careful," she calls out, though her hands are full of papers and her eyes are full of split loyalties.

Work.

Child.

"What's the matter?" House asks. "You don't trust him with her?"

"I trust him fine," she replies. "It's his damaged brain I'm a little wary of."

"You think it takes a man with full neurological function to build a tower of blocks on a living room floor?"

He doesn't know if it's stress over the presentation that leaves her so cold but her response is so quick it takes House's breath away.

"I've seen his mood swings, House. I don't want my daughter seeing that."

She says one thing but means another.

Her 'trust', it seems, is barely existent at all.

"I'm worried he'll do something without realising it. It wouldn't be his fault. I'd hate for him to feel responsible for something he didn't mean to do."

"The 'something' he hasn't done, you mean? The 'something' he'd never do?"

"How do you know that?"

"Because I trust him. Because I know him. So do you, Cuddy. Do you think he needs this kind of doubt?"

House resents her questioning Chase. He resents the fact that she'd question him at all. He doesn't like the implication that Chase could pose a danger and, though he understands the over-protective nature of a parent towards their child he can't tolerate it.

There's irony in the fact that he, indeed, is protecting Chase in those very same 'circumstances'.

"Maybe you should take her home. In fact, you should _definitely_ take her home if you're so worried about what big bad Chase might do to her then clearly you shouldn't let him within ten thousand feet of her."

She looks distressed, now. It shows in those huge blue eyes.

House almost feels guilty until he looks at Chase so embroiled in building up a house so innocently, so without malice, that it causes him to lose all sense of it.

"It's not that. House, you're taking this all the wrong way."

"Am I? You're questioning how safe it is to leave your kid with him when he's done nothing to justify that caution."

"I told you. It's not him I'm worried about. It's just…you said it yourself. He's unpredictable."

"So are you during your time of the month. I've been running for cover God knows how many times when the painters were in."

He's not raising his voice but he is becoming agitated. Cuddy senses it. She senses it in the same way she senses this 'visit' is becoming untenable.

"Anyway, I'm sure Lucas can help you with your presentation. It's kid's stuff after all."

Kids stuff, he says, after she's worked day and night on the spreadsheets and powerpoints for the past six weeks.

"If you asked him nicely he'd give you all the input you need. I'm sure if you offered him sex twice a day instead of the once he'd listen to you recite the entire bible. He might even pretend you don't bore him to tears."

"House, I – "

She swallows hard.

She feels like a little girl that's been ground into nothing; humiliated by a man she looks up to in a lot of ways.

She doesn't know why he reduces her to this.

House stands up, pushes the chair into the table as he 'marks' his exit. She looks up at him but he doesn't look back.

"It's way past the kid's bedtime," he says. "Chase's, I mean. I dread to think how far past the oompa loompa's is it but I guess you didn't trust Lucas alone with her either."

His smile isn't pleasant.

Nor is the blatant implication.

"It must be a wonderful, trusting relationship you have there."

"He wasn't home…"

"Playing away, now, is he? I'm not interested. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to throw him in his rubber room and pump him full of sedatives. He's _that_ dangerous. I guess the movie'll have to wait."

It's fierce, the way he protects his 'cub', almost lion-esque.

Cuddy truly didn't think he had it in him.


	54. Chapter 68

_Tiniest little pre-Christmas chapter. There shall be more but it might have to wait a day or so. _

**Part 68**

Cameron once focused on Chase's youth, how 'young' he was, how little he had aged and how fresh he could be.

House was the perpetually stubbled older man with an air of jaded cynicism and hair that had turned silver in places, greyed with age.

Chase was gold where House was silver with hair that turned more precious with the sun. He was hopeful and at times naive, always aware of what the future could bring even if his past had brought him very little.

He remains hopeful today, a little glitch in his mood clearing as the snow begins to fall. He tries to look at the future as he looks at the ground today.

Clean and white. Beautiful. There to be created.

He looks upon winter with the eyes of one so young...

There is always a background of happiness when the ground turns white and the landscape blends with those bright cumulonimbus clouds. He looks up, marvelling at the uniqueness of every tiny flake that falls on the lenses of his glasses, magnified, intensified.

"They're like people. No two are the same."

"Yeah, and each and every one of them congeal into one huge mess and get in my way. Snow is like an attractive bitch. Pretty to look at but a nightmare to manoeuvre."

"Bah," Chase smiles. "Humbug."

It's not the joys of Christmas that House fails to experience but there is the inconvenience of it.

"I'm no Ebenezer, Chase. I'm just able to see beyond the beauty."

"It's the most wonderful time of the year."

"Christmas is a retailer's dream. It's nothing to do with virgin birth or little baby Jesus. It's about a 70 year paedophile guilty of breaking and entering and grooming children with presents."

"Harsh..."

"The world is a harsh place, little Robbie. Christmas is just a justification for parents lying to their kids and fat people overindulging. You and I know enough already about lies and indulgence."

Chase raises his eyebrow and looks disbelievingly, just like he used to, with his cold hands in his pockets and that laid back charm on show.

"Whatever you say, House. I'm just enjoying the snow."

"Ten bucks you'll get a migraine when that plate in your head reaches sub-zero, Tin Man."

Chase points to the black woolen hat that Wilson retrieved from his apartment.

He calls it "insu-something."

"Insulation, you half-wit. And to think your vocabulary used to be better than Wilson's."

"If I get a headache then that's the price to pay."

"Great. I see your sense of value hasn't been returned by the Ghost of Christmas Sanity."

Chase trudges a little. The ice, it crackles beneath him as if the ground might open up.

It's priceless.

Chase never saw snow, not as a child. Winters in Melbourne were mild, if wet, but he never felt the texture of snow, so like sand, until he moved away. To Chase, Christmas-time is a warmer climate and a longer day but he can't deny the enchantment of sparkling lights in icy trees, nature's natural twinkle outdoing anything a bulb could create.

It looks beautiful. The snow, it makes the world seem quiet, serene, as if that blanket on the ground soaks up all of the noise, all of the panic.

"Whoever thought snow was good for the earth? God? You're the bible hugger. You tell me what this could possibly be good for?"

The stumble is barely perceptible but it's there. It's only when Chase feels the pull in his own healing leg he realises where House's true reservations lie. He watches him struggle through the tough terrain, watches him grit his teeth as he curses nature. The walk isn't far to those hospital doors but it seems like an endurance trial.

Still, he struggles. Still, he defies his disability.

"Bah," he says finally, though he doesn't complete the anti-greeting.

It's inspirational, in a way.

(*)

There's mistletoe above the doorway to House's office and, to those invited in, there's an obligation to fulfil the only tradition that House chooses to 'practice'.

Not Cuddy, though. Not today.

They once had a patient with the plague, a young woman with a centuries-old curse coursing through her veins leaving her weak and near-death, with pustules beneath her arms and moral blackness to go along with that colour.

Like a vampire, Cuddy is not permitted past the threshold.

Like that very plagued patient, House avoids her as if she could infect him.

(*)

Tis the season to be jolly… if you're anywhere else but here.

It's as if the human race believe that illness should obey the rituals of the species it afflicts.

_It's Christmas_, they say. _How can he get sick at Christmas?_

"I'm sorry," House will reply, "but fever, immune responses and critical illness aren't followers of the festive period. Germs don't believe in the birth of Christ and bacteria stopped believing in Santa Claus when they reached, ooh, seven years old?"

But it's Christmas, they'll say.

It's supposed to be a happy time.

The season of Good Will doesn't 'touch' everyone, though. Often the cracks appear in what seems to be a loving relationship. The pain intensifies. The sense of betrayal, it enhances tenfold with the hanging of tinsel and twinkling lights that illuminate only the fact that 'love' is shambolic and Christmas isn't merry at all.

Their patient had been a mystery until the tree had been torn down; until the façade of Feliz Navidad had been ripped to shreds and rendered 'unmerry'.

"What did you buy _her _for Christmas? Huh? What did you buy for her baby, _your _baby?"

It was the wife that rendered the husband virtually comatose, a slow overdose over a matter of days. His body had gone into shutdown mode compounded by the mild strain of common flu that had rendered his immune system one step from useless.

Before it all turned sour told her he didn't deserve her as she bathed him, held him, played every bit the doting wife.

Then, in his delerium, he'd called her by his other woman's name.

She confessed all as she screamed in his face and the riddle of it all had been solved without the need for extended differential. It was a gift, in a way – a gift that unwrapped itself, saving House and his team from having to go through the rigmarole themselves.

"God bless us," House had said as she's been led away to spend Christmas in a cold, empty cell, her husband left to pick up the pieces of her attempted murder. "Everyone."

(*)

Chase's 'present' is laughable.

"The arm isn't healing right. I'm gonna need more surgery, the sooner the better. Something to do with cartilage and scar tissue. They let me have some gingerbread coffee while they told me that. Generous, right?"

There was always a danger this would be required. With the rehab and healing process there are certain risks. The situation was never straightforward and it was always more the case of when, not if, further surgery would be required.

He smiles sadly.

"You might as well get me a lease on a room in this place. We could decorate it for Christmas. Put a little sign on the door saying 'Santa, please stop here.'"

"Be careful, Chase. Santa doesn't come to little boys who pout."

"I'm not pouting."

"Of course not. Not with a mouth as pretty as yours. When are we looking at?"

Again, 'we'.

It warms Chase a little and it's so, so cold outside.

"They can fit me in now or I can wait until the New Year so it's either this weekend, which means I'll be out of the game for Christmas, or… "

" - Let me guess. You don't want it ruining Christmas."

He didn't realise it was so special for Chase, not until now. He didn't say, didn't want to be a burden.

There's no tree up in their place. There are no decorations.

Perhaps they need to rectify that…

Chase looks wistful. Thoughtful. He holds his arm to his chest as if he's protecting it, protecting himself as he reminisces about the 'old times'.

"Christmas was the only time of year my parents ever made an effort," he says. "Turkey, ham, potatoes, the works. It was the only time I ever really felt part of a family."

House could never imagine Rowan Chase donning a Santa suit to deliver gifts for his son, Mother Chase in an apron making sure the carrots were cooked right through.

The image of domestic bliss seems lost when it comes to Chase but apparently, there were moments.

"I love Christmas," Chase says softly, "even if you think it's a commercial nightmare."

He loves Christmas.

He loves Christmas, and who is House to 'steal' that from him like the Grinch that Wilson always insists that he is?

"January it is, then," he says. "And, if you're really, really good today I might even let you pick out a tree. I'm sure Wilson would bake us some of those ginger cookies that make me question his sexuality year after year as well. If we asked nicely, that is."

"You think?"

"Oh, I know."

To say that Chase's face lights up _like_ Christmas might be pushing it a bit.

There is a hint of delight to it, though.

It's…angelic, really.


	55. Chapter 69

_Happy New Year to everyone. I hope that you all have a wonderful 2011 and that the year to come is a grand one. _

_I, myself, am hoping that 2011 will be better than 2010 and 2009. I'll start it by extending Christmas that little bit more for my favourite two_.

**Part 69**

This is all a little bit too much.

Chase doesn't like the noise. He doesn't like the bright lights, the myriad of sounds, the combination of smells of this place that conjure up images he cannot handle.

He sees a flash of himself in the corner next to the door, longer hair tickling the neck of a white dress shirt, a smile he doesn't recognise on his face because it's so free, so intoxicated, so…inebriated.

He hears a voice in his ear, a voice that isn't there but once was. It's his wife's voice as it whispers, with promise, _"Shall we get out of here?"_

She smells of Chardonnay and her hair tickles his nostrils as he leans into her. He can almost feel her. She's warm. She's slender. She's forward.

She _wants_ him.

This 'spectre' of Cameron isn't his wife. Her behaviour is that of a lover who 'pushes' by choice, not by a name scrawled on paper under the guise of law. He wonders if this memory is from before they were married, a thought compounded by the playful way she puts pressure on him to leave by tugging, pulling, dragging on his hand.

He says his past words out loud, knows they're from memory only they're lifeless, now. They're monotone. He's a bird mimicking, not possessing free thought.

"_Mmm, do I get my Christmas present tonight, Cam?"_

"_You'll get what I think you deserve."_

He holds his breath as the fire begins to rage, literally as well as figuratively. He stands next to the burning wood as it crackles and burns and gazes into it as the flame meets the ashes. He feels it inside, an old cliché but one that makes sense to him. His chest, it burns with the pressure of putting on a front, of pretending that all is fine.

His fists curl tight into the loose-fitting trousers that feel like a theatrical costume. The stage, it seems, is too vast for him, haunted by Phantoms of an Opera he doesn't recall.

Another thought. Another voice in his head. Another year, another time, another party just like this one.

She even smells the same.

"_Merry Christmas, Mrs Chase."_

Nothing changes – but, everything changes.

The old hall is huge, the oldest part of the hospital. It carries the sound, its acoustics made for grand speeches and large, important addresses. Every word is amplified. Every song, it's enhanced ten times over. Every bout of laughter deafens, raucous, strident.

Every kiss that's placed upon his head or his lips, it bruises.

"Merry Christmas," he says, on repeat, but there is no thought behind the words because the words mean nothing.

He doesn't know these people…

"I'm so glad you're still here," one tells him. "I dread to think we could be toasting your memory this Christmas."

"Thanks," he whispers, haunted by the doctor's words.

Dressed in a dinner jacket and a bow-tie he _looks_ the part but he feels like a small child amongst grand men, a tiny fish swimming in a vast ocean that's far, far too big for him. He's just about treading water with House 'doing the rounds', dazed and overwhelmed and practically cowering in the corner.

He gazes out of the window in a moment of reprieve between music.

The snow is so silent…so peaceful…

(*)

They tell him he was the life and soul of last year's party, that he crawled out of his shell with such enthusiasm that he was almost unrecognisable. He can't imagine, can't even begin to picture a Robert Chase that would ever grow accustomed to this kind of get-together. He just smiles politely when they forget, when they offer him champagne regardless of 'doctor's orders'. He tells them he'd rather stay sober. That way he'll be the one with the stories. He'll be the one with the clear memory for a change.

He sits in a corner this year arranging balls and trinkets from a glass display by size, by shape, by colour. His mind focuses on those ornaments as if they're the most important thing in his world as he lines them up row upon row. They've found that he 'deals with things' better when he can focus on a simple task, one he is able to complete, and that Rubik cube that was given to him has been nothing short of miraculous during his therapy sessions.

He's not in therapy now but he's still exhibiting signs of stress through the way he handles these articles; the way he shuts himself off from the rest of the party and challenges himself for calm.

"Are you okay?" a voice asks as his eyes begin to cloud over, hypnotised by the job at hand. He doesn't look up but, from the sound and the scent he knows this is Wilson. He often identifies the way a blind man might, not quite trusting what his eyes tell him.

He nods quietly as he 'categorises' a small white angel with the silver items.

"Great."

A little voice in his head, it says: _This was never meant to last, was it?_

"Is it all a bit too much for you?"

He blinks. Now, he looks up.

"A little."

"I can imagine this is a pretty confusing time for you."

"It's not the worst…"

He looks back at the young man nursing his sick, verbally abusive mother and that kid's swimming in the smoke. He remembers Christmas morning spent cleaning up a vomit stained carpet and locking his mother in her room whilst he made his way to church.

She didn't stir.

Christmas Dinner those days was no plump turkey or goose-roasted potatoes the way it had been before. He fixed himself a ham sandwich and sat down to watch re-runs of A Christmas Carol on TV.

What is it now?

He looks at House, himself on the periphery looking in, on the outside of the circle, and he imagines House in his place, looking after him where he looked after his mother, taking care of him where he took care of her.

He wonders if his life has come full circle in some warped, illogical way.

"Look, if you need to go I can drive him home," Wilson offers. "I understand that it can be overwhelming. After Amber died I didn't want to even face Christmas. That sense of loss…it's intensified around this time. I can only imagine how it feels for you. You've lost everything, pretty much."

"Not everything," he says quietly, but there's emotion in Wilson that he doesn't want to argue with. He hears the trace of wine in Wilson's voice, that loose-lipped honesty that seems to come with alcohol consumption.

"When she went I felt that I had. It must be worse for you. Worse than if someone died."

The fact that Chase doesn't know who Amber is, that's lost on Wilson.

He doesn't ask.

"I didn't die," he says, and Wilson nods his head, places a hand on his shoulder. The sigh, it's one of a man with so many weights on his own shoulders that he's hard pressed to stand upright.

Half of those weights aren't even his own.

"Next year will be better, Chase. For all of us."

If Chase knew how to reciprocate he'd do it.

For Wilson.

When he tells him "Merry Christmas" it's the first time he's meant those words all night.

(*)

House finds him shivering on a bench in the doorway. There are flakes on his eyelashes, gentle, perfectly intact. The only thing warding off the cold is a thin suit jacket and a pair of surgical gloves.

His arms aren't wrapped around himself. They're sat neatly on his lap.

He's so quiet it's eerie.

"Are you completely insane?" House asks. "On long-term medication for your lungs but you think it's fine to sit in sub zero temperatures. I see your logic's returning thick and fast."

Slowly, he turns.

"I needed a break."

"So, you thought the possibility of a few days in an induced coma with pneumonia was the way to go? Oh, wait. Didn't you already try that one?"

Chase smiles. It's a strange little smile. Distant. Faraway.

"Just a break from the party. Just from people."

"And, from me?"

"How could I ever get away from you?"

He shifts a little in his seat and House wonders if it's invitation.

"It's so quiet out here. You can just about see the trees in the distance. All the lights….all the sounds…"

"…are all very nice, Chase, but if I'm not mistaken there's a tree inside where it's warm and where you're _not_ at risk for serious illness so why don't we make like a tree and leave for that nice warm _sensible_ place?"

House considers taking his arm and dragging him inside, frog-marching him through those doors like a disobedient subordinate but something in Chase's demeanour forces him to stop for a moment.

Something about his silence, his distance, it causes him to hold off.

"It's all so...marzipan."

"Marzipan. Jesus Christ, has the cold got to you already? Do I need to tie you to the chair to keep you in check?" 

"No, I mean…it's all so marzipan, isn't it? What's the point of it? Sure, the cake's nice. The way it's decorated, it's real pretty. It probably tastes good…but, this party, it's just like the marzipan, isn't it? What's the point of it? What does it preserve? In the grand scheme of that cake, I mean, what's the point of it?"

In the grand scheme of Christmas, what's the point of this party? Is that what he's asking? Sure, some might consider this party an integral part of the season but it is it really necessary to the overall taste?

Does it preserve anything at all?

"As far as metaphors go, Chase, that was a pretty lame one."

"I wasn't going for anything meaningful, House. I was just expressing myself. I was using symbolic thought. My therapists are always on at me to start using my brain more."

He sighs.

"Do I want to offer hollow little greetings to people I probably don't even like?"

"It's called being a person. Everybody lies."

"I don't want to lie."

"That's because you're an idiot and that head injury didn't change that."

He's an idiot – but, what does that make House?

What does that make House, who sits down beside him with his own suit jacket unfastened, with his own bones shivering in the harshness of this beautiful, beautiful night?

They sit like that for awhile just enjoying the quiet. They listen to the distant voices, the happiness of those that don't quite fit with them. They sit on the outside where they feel they belong.

Where they've always belonged…

"I'm going to head home," Chase says quietly. He looks pale. He looks exhausted. He looks vulnerable, with his hair soaking wet and his fingers red from cold.

He looks…done.

"You can stay if you like. I'm just…not feeling it."

"Not feeling the whole façade of friendship and love and festivities? How can you say that?"

"That's not Christmas to me."

He wonders what Christmas is. It's more grateful than that. It's more provoking. It's more than just expensive food and elegant dresses.

It's more than indulgence.

"So you acknowledge that it's all just one great big farce. Excellent, Chase. You're learning fast"

"I won't wait up. I'm so tired you probably won't even wake me when you come home. I'll go straight to bed."

"What, and miss the dawning of Christmas Day? If you stay awake you might just catch a glimpse of Santa Claus."

He smiles.

"I've known there was no Santa since I was four years old. Yeah, I still got presents but my parents always wanted me to know that they were from them. They never wanted to baby me."

"Yeah, your mom wanted a new purse but got a kid instead. I understand that."

"My grandmother used to tell me that if I was a good boy the Jezisek would bring me lots of nice things."

"The child Jesus…"

"Yeah. She had a little figurine of him on her fireplace. I used to kiss its forehead every night before bed when I stayed with her."

He smiles softly.

"Everything changes though, right?"

House looks through that faux-snowed window. He sees Foreman drinking champagne with Cuddy, a jovial smile plastered upon his handsome, dark face, and Taub, strategically placed near the mistletoe where he can betray his wife over and over citing 'non-Jewish tradition' as his lively excuse.

House sees it for what it is just as Chase does; a mockery and a façade, an empty box wrapped up in silver paper with bows and ribbons and swirls just to make it look like something it's not.

"Not everything changes."

He doesn't care about these people.

He doesn't need this.

"We'll go."

Chase hadn't meant to drag House down. He didn't want him to leave on his accord.

"You don't have to go, House. You don't have to leave because of me."

"Give me a minute. I'll just confiscate a few bottles of wine and we'll be on our merry way. Binge drinking isn't the way forward. We don't want the hospital to be understaffed because these celebratory morons don't know when to stop."

They'll be going well into the night. They'll end up in each other's arms, in each other's beds, in each other's faces. Chase feels overwhelmed by the brightness, by the noise, by the overt affection shown by people who feel nothing for each other on a 'normal' day.

House emerges victorious, two bottles beneath his coat and no drunk colleague on his arm.

Instead, he takes home a brain damaged one.

"Lets go."

They leave like thieves in the night, no song or dance, no kiss goodnight for the masses of professional revellers, no dramatic exit for the 'outcasts' that find themselves together this Christmas.

Chase looks towards House as he leads the way through the 'blizzard' and out into the clear.

There's an ocean of debris where Chase once was but he breathes. He breathes because of House. He lives because of this man and he wonders if House is what the Jezisek brought him this year.

There's certainly nobody else he wants to share this time with.

(*)


	56. Chapter 70

_I don't know why I felt the need to write this chapter. It just kind of came to me. _

_Fluff is never just fluff with me…_

**Part 70**

His speech always fails him when he's tired. He's resolute to change that in the New Year but it may not be in his power. House attempts to make conversation but Chase can't find the right words to put together, lapsing incessantly as he tries to make his mouth correspond correctly with the words he wishes to say.

This is one of his downfalls. Many a panic attack, a petulant stance, a temper tantrum or a crack in his Matrix have been caused by his inability to express himself in moments such as these, ergo he remains quiet.

"Not talking?"

House knows why. He noticed the lapses, heard the rapid exhalations of frustrated breath.

Not trusting his voice, Chase shakes his head. He puts his hands in his pockets and tries to act casual. He knows he can play the part if he puts his mind to it. He knows that House will comprehend.

"Gah. Who needs words anyway?"

That earns a smile from buttoned lips.

They walk home, House above the limit for driving, Chase stripped of his license as if he were no longer good enough for the roads. It annoys him. It belittles him. He's been driving since he was short of his seventeenth birthday and he wonders how they could imply he might've forgotten how to do it.

He accepts, just as he always does when things don't go his way. Begrudgingly. Unwillingly, but as calmly as he can.

The streets are oddly quiet this time of night. In the far distance there are carollers, intoxicated males singing "God Rest ye Merry Gentlemen" with such blind irony it almost makes House laugh. It's eerie. The black sky bleeds into the dim lit streets and they can barely see where they're going. Instinct and directional sense leads them down the right path and House is pleased to know that Chase's 'homing instinct' is alive and well, perfect and intact. Still, he stops on a corner and stares longingly towards the apartment block that used to be his. Something in his head draws him to that street, quiet and snow-drift and lined with twinkling Firs.

House wonders what he's thinking; whether he's imagining walking this path in times gone by, seeing ghosts of himself stood with laughter in a shop doorway as he kisses his sweetheart hello and goodbye.

He looks as if he's about to try and say something but is silenced by time, by circumstance.

Now is not the time or the place for impromptu visits to an apartment he's long abandoned.

"Some other time," House says, as he takes Chase's arm and pulling him from whatever magnet that seemed to be calling him. "The fire awaits. The tree needs to be lit. Your bed is screaming your name."

Softer, now. "You look tired, Chase. Lets get you home."

Chase goes along with him because he understands there's nothing for him down there. It's home that may never be home again. It's home without his presence; with only the aura of who he was, not who he is.

Still, he can't help but wonder whether the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Future might give way to the Ghosts of Christmas Past if he were to cross that threshold.

(*)

When the bells toll it's Christmas Day.

It's Christmas Day, and he's backed up against the kitchen wall with a gun pointed at his head and a woolen-faced man screaming in his face. The only thing that Chase can think, between gasped breaths, is "It's not supposed to be this way."

Nothing is damaged but the front door. Nothing has stirred but kitchen drawers, their contents scattered over the ground as if they mean nothing.

Forks. Spoons.

More worryingly, knives – but, the gun that the intruder holds bypasses all of those potential weapons and renders them pointless. Second-best.

Out of the corner of his eye Chase can see the lights flickering in the living room, dainty, bell-like, glistening in the windows of this homely place.

"Wh-what…n…hey…"

Again, his voice betrays him.

He wonders whether he'd be better off if the gun went off.

"What the Hell are you doing in my apartment?" House yells. "What do you want?"

"Don't move," the intruder screams, waving the gun in House's direction. "Don't fucking move, I mean it. I'll shoot him. I'll shoot _you_."

Any other man would have the common sense to look frightened. This isn't the first time House has had a gun pointed at him, has to wonder whether or not lightning would dare to strike twice.

He won't hold his hands up. Not in his own home. Not when this moron hasn't even taken the safety off his gun.

The psychologist in House sees a man in despair, rather than a man embroiled in anger.

He sees a man likely to threaten but not provide a follow through.

Simply put, House sees a coward; proceeds on that basis.

"You won't shoot me in my own home. It's Christmas Day."

"You think Christmas is anything to me? Huh? You think it means anything now?"

He presses the gun harder. Chase gasps in fear, in pain. Tears prick at his eyes and he doesn't know how to stop them.

He tries to stutter out a plea. What do you want? What do you want from us? His voice, though, it's just a series of unintelligible sounds; words that aren't words at all. It frustrates him.

The light bouncing from the barrel of this gun, it blinds him.

The intruder turns to him when he shifts. He presses a knee against his thigh to hold him still. His leg, it buckles, unable to withstand pressure such as this.

"Stand up," the voice growls. "Get up. Do you hear me?"

He doesn't make sense. He tries to answer the question that's put to him but the words come out all wrong.

"Are you trying to be funny? Oh, funny guy. Real funny guy. Where do you keep the money? Fucking doctors, they're always loaded. Where do you stash the cash?"

At the worst possible time, Chase's brain injury gets the better of him.

He shakes his head desperately. He stutters hard. He's trying. He's trying so hard.

"There is no money," House calls out. "You think I'm stupid enough to keep it in the apartment? I do have a bank account."

He chooses not to push upon the fact that this man knew his profession. Instead, he focuses on the fact that he might not have the safety off that pistol in his hand but the way his wrist is trembling indicates he could easily use it to slam across Chase's forehead.

The growl is, again, one of despair rather than anger.

He raises his arm unsteadily.

He breathes as if air is toxic to him.

"Don't hit him," House yells out. "Unless you want a murder charge on your wanted sheet, don't hit him."

The intruder pauses. His anger, it seems, is not uncontrolled.

"He's not being awkward to piss you off. Take a look at his head."

With every flash of those Christmas lights that deep scar is visible. On, off. There, and then gone. It's jagged. It's healing.

It's his only saving grace; the fact that he's helpless. The fact that he's broken already.

"You really want to add to that? He learned to tie his shoelaces only this month. You gonna take that from him?"

"Ah, fuck."

House watches as the man's arm drops; as he momentarily loses the will to hurt his captive. He watches as he loses his resolve and takes it as opportunity.

He releases his grip on the young man he's scared to tears, lets him fall to the ground breathing, panting, choking on bile as it threatens to spill through fear. Adrenaline riding high, he's no longer tired, but he can't fight and he can't fly so he just stays where he is.

"Good. That's good. Leave him out of it. He doesn't even know his own name. Why don't you tell me yours?"

Chase might be slow, might be addled and confused, but God is on his side in this instant.

He lifts his arm, supported by the temporary splint, and he drives it into the masked man's throat choking him temporarily, winding him, dazing him.

He attempts to grapple the gun from the man's hands yet he becomes his own downfall. He feels a sharp blow to his thigh and it sends him spiralling into blackness for a second, for a split second, even.

Chase finds himself captive once more, an easy target – a sitting duck with an arm around his neck and a gun pressed once more to his temple.

He tries to plead.

He tries to say sorry for what he's done.

He can't say a word.

It all happened so quickly that House wasn't able to intervene.

He falls over scattered cutlery.

In the struggle the man's balaclava was removed. His identity is revealed, now, his face the first thing House sees when he returns to lucidity. The pain in his own leg is compounded by the metal he has fallen upon.

He imagines that spoon was used to gouge away his muscle and coughs once. Twice.

"Get up," the man growls. "Get up or I swear to God I'll make him forget less than his own name."

His voice is still desperation rather than anger.

There's something in him that's battling with the violence he's expressing, here and now.

House gathers his senses the best that he can despite the radiating pain that seems to deafen as well as grind.

"_You_. I treated you in the clinic yesterday. Herpes, right? Spending too much time dipping your wick with hookers instead of servicing your wife."

"_Fuck_ you."

A wince, as House pulls himself to his feet, as he brushes himself off, as he casts a meaningful eye in Chase's direction to make sure the boy's still breathing.

He is. Barely.

"Nah, I'm too clean for that."

It makes sense how he knew House was a doctor, now, how he might've assumed Chase was, too.

"Let me guess. You heard one of the nurses talking about the party and saw it as a good opportunity to rob the person that treated you. How's that for gratitude?"

"Insulted. You _insulted_ me."

"And, now you've not only tried to rob me but you've threatened a disabled kid. I think that puts you on the road to Hell, my friend, let alone making us even."

"Hell? You don't know what Hell is. My _wife_ left me because of you."

It angers him, this selfishness. It angers House, this inability to let go of what you no longer require; what's old and worn and damaged yet the cowardice renders a person unable to reject it.

"On Christmas fucking Eve. My wife left me on Christmas Eve. She took my kid. My _kid_."

Is he planning on taking House's?

"You didn't want her anyway. If she could satisfy you why did you have to pay for it elsewhere? I did you a favour."

"_**Shut**_ up."

"Or what? Or he gets it? That's real brave. Real smart. What, were you planning to steal from us or shoot us? What is it you want?"

From somewhere, Chase's nerves inspire him to speak.

From somewhere deep inside, his words come out right, despite everything.

"House, p-please…"

"Shh, Chase. Let me handle this."

Chase can only breathe hitchingly, frightened, hurt, upset.

"You see what you're doing? You're scaring him. You're scaring him on Christmas Day. You think that's clever?"

Chase doesn't think House is clever. After all, he isn't the one with his back pressed hard against a kitchen worktop. House isn't the one with a gun pushed into his head so hard it's bruising him. Hurting him.

House isn't the one with a metal plate in his skull that would surely shatter if it were to be hit hard enough; with a fragile body that'd give up if it were to suffer one more blow.

House isn't the one in danger, here.

"You were gonna shoot us, Darryl?"

It gets him.

The fact that House personalises this, it gets to him.

"You remember my name."

"Sure. I remember the names of all of my patients. Especially the ones who don't deserve to be treated at all. Think of me as Santa Claus. You're on my naughty list."

"Do you _want_ me to hurt him? You fucking bastard, do you _want_ me to make you pay?"

Ignoring those words entirely, House asks "What would your wife think? What would your son think? What would Child Protective Services think if they found out you threatened a kid with a gun?"

House sees him breaking, now.

"My son…"

"…your son doesn't deserve to visit his dad in prison. Believe me. It's not big and it's not clever."

Instead of anger, now he sees tears.

"You bastard," Darryl whispers.

"I didn't ruin your life."

They fall freely, now. Those shoulders, they sink.

With words of his son, this man was defeated.

"No. You didn't ruin my life. But, you helped."

House just nods his head.

"Yeah, yeah."

"You helped."

"Put the gun down, now, Darryl. You've made your point. I'm an asshole. But, tell me…are you not the same?"

He watches as the realisation hits this ridiculous, silly little man.

He watches as his arms fall to his sides, watches as Chase scrambles away from him when his body is cooperative enough to move.

It makes him feel warm how the terrified young man stands in front of him; how he offers himself to protect House for he feels it's what he needs to do.

He tries to stand tall but House sees him falter.

He sees his legs weaken, as well as his resolve.

"Go inside, Chase," House whispers. "Go on. Let me handle this."

He doesn't miss how Chase bends down on shaky legs; how he grasps a corkscrew for protection, for help, doesn't miss how he refuses to remove his tear-stained eyes from the man until he's safe and sound in the belly of the house.

"Now, go. Go home. Get out of my apartment and go apologise to your wife. Don't let your poor son wake up without a father."

"You're not gonna call the cops?"

"I don't have time for the paperwork. But, I know your name. I only have to tape a few keys on a computer to find out where you live."

Darryl doesn't wait to hear any more.

He doesn't wait for blue flashing lights, for House to betray his word.

As House watches him scramble pathetically into the night he thinks of Chase; thinks to himself, rather frighteningly, how willing he was to die for the boy.

He closes the door.

He closes the door and he locks it where he can. He pushes a table up against it and hopes it'll hold until morning. Outside, there is wind whistling in the trees and the tiny hint of jingling bells coming from just over the park.

In the apartment all that's left is the silence. The threat neutralised. The knowledge that they are alone.

Chase is sat on the floor shaking, shaking so badly his teeth chatter. His eyes are wide and blue, his body tense and pained. House notes bruising appearing on his temple, knows it'll be bright and vivid when the sun finally rises on this Christmas Day.

House utters but one word.

"Eventful."

Nothing more. Nothing less.

They sit on the couch next to the fire. Once the embers begin to brighten the trembling begins to stop.

House pulls Chase close. Holds him there for just a minute until Chase hands him the corkscrew.

"For the wine," he says softly, finally able to grasp his words.

Neither of them move to go to bed. They just sit here. Together. In silence. Only the sound of the television whispering out old Christmas tunes accompanies them; only the sound of the crackling fire.

It's not loud enough to drown out the fact that House's heart is beating in his chest; the fact he's pounding with that inevitable burst of energy that got him through that.

Chase leans into House, leans into the man who saved him and whom he tried to save, and he holds on to this moment.

Nothing seems real, not here, not now.

He imagines a camera panning out and capturing them sat here together, no interaction, no action at all, no need for words, no need for movement.

Survivors, the two of them.

Family where no family exists.


	57. Chapter 71

_Hmm, there is no fluff in this chapter, I'm afraid…_

_Looks like Chase and House are heading towards enforced separation._

**(*)**

Things were always black and white for Chase as a child. He lived his life in monochrome because nothing else ever fit. His spectrum was flawed by too-logical parents and too-little colour. How often he heard his mother stating "there must be a reason," searching frantically for the genesis of an occurrence in order for it to make sense, to be explainable.

She would smile but it wasn't a smile. He learned it. He learned what it meant. Her life was concrete and asphalt. It was necrotic. Nothing grew but her own paranoia powered by voices that fought to be heard above each other.

"People don't just do things," she would say. "There has to be a reason."

Chase wondered one day why things just couldn't simply be; why they couldn't exist within that vast area between. After all, is life not a palette of colours, from the red of the tulips in his garden to the bright blue of an Australian sky?

Aren't people like that, too? He wanted them to be.

His mother convinced him otherwise, told him to be careful, that living in the 'grey' area only led to trouble. He learned from that. There was no longer need for colour and possibility, only explanation.

Then he learned against it when life just didn't exist within a sphere of explanation.

Things are no longer monochrome for Chase. There is more light in his spectrum. Along with that, however, there is also more darkness. He needs that balance. At times he feels aphotic, a stunted, wilting flower without sunshine. Other times, he just feels dazzled.

Tonight he feels blinded by light yet he cowers in darkness. White on black. Black on white.

Tonight he is the paradox.

House is a rainbow whereas he is his own mother searching desperately for reason where reason does not exist.

"Why?" he asks of the man that violated his peace. He wants to talk now.

His questions are unanswerable.

"Why would he do that?"

"Just because," House replies. "That's the black and white of it. Because he felt justified."

"But, why?"

It's a crooked letter that cannot be straightened, an answer that cannot be given.

"I don't know why."

It makes Chase confused. For it to be so grey, it makes him so powerless. Like his mother, he tries to chase the genesis of the act. There isn't one that he could ever understand.

"You can't control everything, Chase," House tells him. "Shit happens."

There is no ultimate control. He is the picture, not the painter. He did not orchestrate his life, is the piece of music and not the composer.

_Shit happens._

It's not enough. His fractured mind can't cope with mindless uncertainty and so he draws an invisible barrier around himself in this precise moment, a barrier that had been there once before yet had been traversed, somehow. A man with silvering hair and the bluest eyes had climbed that wall, had gained entry and left him vulnerable.

Nobody else will get in. Not now.

No-one else will be permitted.

()

There are answers in solitude. That's what Chase hopes.

There is safety not in numbers but in isolation. He never feared people, not in the worst times, but he did join the seminary, in part, to be alone.

House catches Chase with his head bowed and his lips moving in time with music he cannot hear, iridescent sounds that exist in Chase's head and are audible only to him.

He kneels before the window. It's 5am and House knows he hasn't slept. As he lights a thick, red candle his hand trembles.

The flame flickers. So does the man.

It's Christmas morning and last night their sanctuary, his sanctuary, was violated not by a commercial man in a red suit but a man with red in his eyes, irrational and senseless. To House it's an inconvenience. Finding a way to fix a door on a public holiday will be logistically impossible and there's a draft he's attempting to combat, barricading the source of cold with a rolled up blanket.

He won't call the cops.

It's good will for Darryl in the season of the same.

To Chase, it's an event he cannot resolve with his lagging thought processes already dulled by tiredness. To Chase, the memory of having a gun pressed against his broken skull is greater than the absence of memory of all else.

He quakes like the ground beneath him and around him once did. The chance of implosion is high.

It's only when House moves closer he realises Chase is again praying, offering himself up for a peaceful, fearless life on this, Jesus' birthday.

Chase doesn't see House's reflection in the window. He doesn't see that face appear as he kneels forth and pleads with his 'saviour' for guidance and for assistance, for proof that the world is good and just and he is not abandoned within it.

So often, he has felt abandoned. In his head, he thinks 'my own wife abandoned me'.

He wonders why?

Again, that question.

Why?

House puts a hand on Chase's shoulder as if announcing "I'm here."

It startles him so much he burns himself as the candle falls and the wax bleeds all over him.

()

House mentions nothing of the intrusion. Not willingly. He doesn't want to jiggle the wound, pushes the issue away though he knows he will regret. A meaningless event, he calls it, preferring to bury it under gift wrap and sticky tape than have it dangling on display like some kind of damning decoration.

He tries his hardest to ignore the fact that Chase jumps at any noise; that he reacts as if the bullets are flying and the sky is falling.

It's only when he sees the physical agitation that he grazes the issue.

"You want to get it out or are you going to visibly flinch every time there is sound?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Chase says and irrationally, irresponsibly, House encourages the burial. It's easier for him.

He can deal with this when Chase is ready.

"Its Christmas," the younger man says, though his tone says "Let's get this over with."

House feels humbled by the gift Chase acquired for him, a strangely battered copy of English Classics he picked up at an old bookstore near hospital grounds. It's leather, lovingly worn Inside he's scrawled an inscription: 'From me to you. Hoping next year will be brighter. Thank you for everything.'

He wrote every word correctly, an achievement to be proud of. The sentence was grammatically perfect.

House doesn't know how it took him an hour to process.

House bought him an iPod because 'all the kids have them'. Already, he's filled it with memory games and a touch of classic with a cheap replica of Sonic the Hedgehog. Thusfar, Chase hasn't touched it. He's virtually afraid of it, longs for the comfort of Compact Discs and cassette tapes. He understands that 'age' is long dead but it was his era. His fun was a bulky stereo, not this.

"It's great," he says. "Really."

"It's the future," House replies.

"Isn't everything?"

He looks like a lost puppy, adorably dishevelled.

House taps that blond head as if it might retrieve him but it doesn't.

Jittery and on edgy, totally regressed, Chase angrily slaps his hand away.

"Don't."

()

The day itself is a tornado building up it's power. There's a distinct feeling that sooner or later the storm is going to reach it's peak.

There is no de-escalation and when a quaint group of elderly carolers knock to bid good tidings it only makes the situation worse.

"Do you hate Good King Wenseslas so much?" House asks as Chase practically barricades the door closed.

He says nothing.

He just looks.

"I'm tired," he says when pushed to, as if this is an adequate response.

"Figures."

At noon, Wilson brings hand-made mince pies and some Christmas crackers. He comments upon the state of the door only to be told that Chase is going through that 'awkward stage where he likes to headbutt things'. Wilson recommends a time-out room...or, more long term, respite care. He does it quietly. If the oddly silent Chase can hear him he makes no indication.

"Whether or not you are bending the truth," he says, as he watches Chase stare silently out of the window, "it's something you need to consider."

"I don't 'have' to do anything."

"Should, then."

"You 'should' get yourself a girlfriend who doesn't walk all over you but you don't hear me telling you what to do."

"Except every day. Loudly."

"Yes, well. Did you ever listen?"

"Oh, come on, admit it. He's adorable. More adorable than the girlfriend you're not with on Christmas Day."

"I'm Jewish."

"So what's with the gifts?"

"_You're_ not Jewish and last time I failed to get you a gift you made it about my Jewishness. What's with the tree, anyway? I thought you hated decoration."

House shrugs.

"Chase wanted it."

Sometimes, Wilson hates what Chase has unwittingly done to a man he loves as a friend, the cultured responsibility, the Forever Obligation that stemmed from all of this. He told Chase to go home from the party in hopes of House staying, living his life whilst 'the baby' slept.

There is no life, now, but this.

"You look exhausted."

"We didn't sleep much."

He refuses to acknowledge why. It's none of Wilson's business.

"You never sleep. You're lagging at work. Cuddy's started to notice. She's not stupid."

"Oh, really?"

"You need help with him. A couple of days a week wouldn't hurt him."

"Except that it would."

"You'd be fresher. More able to deal with-"

"The burden? The strain?"

"The issues."

It's easy to say today when the issues are glaring; when Chase is less himself than ever.

Most days, however, are relatively simple.

"There are no issues, no problem, Wilson. He's funny. He walks into things. He talks funny. He's comic relief."

Still, House yawns as he places a hand on his neck and tries to work out the kinks.

He leans back.

"I like things the way they are. Am I weird?"

"Tis the season to be jolly, House, not like this."

It's something House doesn't want to think about, doesn't want to speak of it. Tis the season to be jolly and all he says is "Fa la la la la la la la la."

It's infuriating but it indicates his unwillingness to bend. He's rigid. There is no 'give' in him.

Wilson should know that already.

()

They try to make things normal but House seems distracted and Chase isn't here at all.

Wilson dons no gay apparel but he does play Santa as he dishes out a vintage guitar book for House and, for Chase, a personal organiser. He just stares at it, tired, expressionless, deteriorated vastly since only the night before, perhaps even since Wilson arrived.

Wilson points at the notes and tabs as if they're magical, has always shunned technology for a more practical approach. The written word, he says, cannot let you down.

"This way, you can organise your thoughts. If something comes to mind you can write it down. You can be more responsible for yourself."

Ergo, making House less responsible.

He thinks, does Wilson. Such a cerebral man.

"I can catalogue my life," Chase says, absently. "Great."

What would last night's events fall under? Having tried to put it to the back of his mind he doesn't even know.

"Thanks," he says quietly as he turns the pages without thought.

House smiles at the disinterest, at the absence of his charge.

"He's clearly overwhelmed."

Chase can bear to be civil. Still, he can't bear to be alone. He follows House around as if there's an invisible leash around his neck, a security restraint he does not wish to lose. Hours have passed and, understandably, he flinches at every sound. His breathing becomes weak and shallow when House moves out of his line of vision.

For an unknown reason he covers his ears when a motorbike revs through the snow.

The hands remain in place blocking out all sound.

House doesn't hide his concern well but verbally, at least, he plays it down.

"Like I said, he's just overwhelmed. Overtired. Like a kid at Christmas."

"He's behaving erratically, House."

"When does he not?"

Wilson sighs.

"You're not listening."

()

It reaches a head, a peak, when House disappears from sight. The young man's agitation reaches crisis levels when he finds himself unattended, his life support removed even if only momentarily.

He panics. Cries out.

He moves to bolt, haunted, unreachable.

When Wilson moves to hold him back he turns his body as if it's on an axis and, though his arm is injured the impact is unmistakable.

He connects physically. Mentally, he doesn't connect at all.

Wilson lies with his hand cradled around his jaw. He feels the throb and the heat, the sensation of a rapidly forming haematoma.

He sees the blue of Chase's eyes wear itself down to grey and there's nothing there.

There's nothing there.

He bleeds beneath the skin as Chase's unhinged terror bleeds from every pore but his face simply doesn't reflect.

He breathes long and hard, oblivious to his actions.

"Merry Christmas to you, too," Wilson says, stunned, wondering if God blessed one and all after all.

()

He's inconsolable.

He's shaking and crying and wounded and the words he repeats are "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

He pleads not to be sent away, begs for forgiveness for an action that was virtually remote.

He has no memory of driving his fist into Wilson's jaw. His behaviour autonomic, he was in a trance.

It was the sight of blood that brought him round.

That, and the voice of House yelling out loud, admitting heavy-heartedly that perhaps Wilson is right.

"I'm sorry," Chase repeats, one last time.

House pulls him close, much to Wilson's dismay. He pulls him close and presses his lips against that soft, fevered brow and whispers "I'm sorry, too."

It's Christmas. All through the house on Christmas Eve, not a creature was stirring.

On Christmas Day, there is nothing but chaos.


	58. Chapter 72

_Forgive me for the angstiness of these chapters. There has to be a means to an end though, you know? They say you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone and I'm working on that basis. _

(*)

"I'm sorry."

Is this how it's to be, this cycle of rage and guilt, of confusion, of 'sorry' for eternity? Is there to be a whole circle of events which all come back to this time and time again?

There's a Chase shaped piece that House has bitten off and it's difficult for him to chew.

Wilson asks what he's going to do, demands to be told how a resolution is to be reached. It's like he's looking for something, anything to grasp onto, anything which will mean his blood was not shed for nothing.

"I'm fine. We're fine. You can just go. I'll clean up the mess."

_I'm not fine. We're not fine. This mess is of our own making. _

The mess is broken glass and blood on the floor where Wilson's resentment and pity seeped through.

The mess is Chase, hounded and terrified and unaware of his own strength. The mess is a young man that's fighting against himself, now, as he grasps a cushion to his chest as if that alone can ground him.

His eyes dart around as if he's expecting something. A blow. A kick. An intrusion.

He presses the balls of his hands into his eye sockets to try to make it go away.

"I could make some calls," Wilson says quietly, watching Chase's actions. "He would be safe."

"He's safe here."

_No, he isn't_.

"You're not a psychiatrist, House. You're not a psychologist. You're fighting in the dark, here."

"No, I'm not."

_Yes, I am. _

"Something triggered this, House, or maybe nothing did at all, but isn't that worse?"

"I _know_ what triggered this."

"And, can you fix it?"

House says nothing.

The sigh is a representation of defeat, a verbalised sound that spells the end. The battle is lost. Wilson holds the handkerchief to his pinched nose but there's no anger in him. There is only the vivid colour of anxiety which paints his brown eyes a bright shade of concerned.

"Denial isn't a river in Egypt, House. It's running right through your apartment. You're drowning in it. And, so is he."

House might be saved from drowning in it if he'd accept the rope that people keep throwing him.

Chase needs a whole lot more than rope.

"Thanks for the presents," House says, his voice so low it can barely be heard and, when he closes the door upon his best friend the only thought he has is that he's losing him fast.

He can't lose him.

He's torn.

"I'm sorry," comes the meek voice behind him, a muddle of a young man sobbing and shaking beside a leather couch he clings to, now. House takes steps towards him and he looks so small, so small…

"Chase – "

He looks up, cowering away from House's loaded stare.

"Please don't – "

Please don't, he says, as if he fears what House will do, but what he really means is _"Please don't send me away." "Please don't say what I know you're thinking."_

House sits down beside him, the flickering of those Christmas lights a comfort in his peripheral vision yet at the same time a torture in themselves because they're representative of the joyous occasion that this isn't; the warm, festive period that seems to have mocked them both.

Who were they kidding when they thought they could play happy families?

Who were they trying to con? Their lives have never been picture perfect. Fate didn't deal them that card so why should they be dealt it now?

"I told you Christmas was a commercial waste of time. Too much tension. Too many expectations. Too great a height to fall from."

He tries to smile.

"You think our friend Darryl would've pointed that gun at your head if the ghosts of Christmas Future weren't painting things bleak and childless for him? No."

Just the name alone is enough to send Chase spinning. House is almost shocked when he crawls across him, head in his lap like a five year old child might, distraught and oblivious to the rights and wrongs of his actions. Such a blatant disregard for his personal space might otherwise be punished with a cane to the ribs or a harsh push to the chest but House is rooted to the spot.

He closes his eyes and raises his head to the Heavens.

God help me, he's saying.

God help me, this isn't me.

Chase buries his face into the hem of House's shirt as if by blocking out the light he might make himself invisible. It's that same old cliché of a childhood 'act' most common in tales of abuse and neglect. Closing one's eyes makes the darkness swallow them. Making oneself vanish.

Chase just wants House to swallow him.

"Let me stay," he pleads. "I don't trust anyone else."

He looks down, the older man, and he sees this shadow creature seeking comfort in him. He pities it, the thing, the being that sobs and whimpers, that bathes itself in tears. It makes him feel wretched and disturbed. _It. Chase._ House dehumanises him because it's the only way he can cope with this mental break, this cracked, dispirited thing that Chase has become.

This isn't a human being, not any more.

It's too difficult to think that a human being could fall apart so spectacularly in House's very grasp.

"Let me stay. I'll get better. I promise."

A promise made to be broken; a promise not in Chase's power to be made.

"Stop crying."

"I-I…"

"**Stop."**

It occurs to House now that, even at the worst of times before, Chase never gave in to his emotions. It occurs to him now that the only time he ever saw the kid close to tears was when he feared he was losing House himself.

Not even Rowan got that 'honour'…

"Chase – "

He just mumbles. House hears the word 'scared' and it twists his stomach into knots so tight he may never unravel them.

"I know you're scared. You think I'm not?"

"No, never."

"Then, you don't know me at all. I'm terrified. I'm terrified of this."

_I'm terrified of you._

_I'm terrified of what you're driving me to. _

He wants to shake the boy but he can't. He wants to exert violence upon him to snap him out of this but he's not his father. Still, his hand balls into a fist and he can't help himself, can't help himself but to feel rage against the machine that chugged out this fate for them both.

House learned from a young age that to cry was a sign of weakness; weakness that would be beaten out of him until he could cry no longer. He won't do that to Chase even if it's a learned response that comes so naturally to him in times of despair. Instead, he reaches down tentatively. At first he dare not touch the trembling body that depends upon him in such a manner that it drains him. His fingers brush over the shuddering flesh that's exposed to him, the pulse throbbing with tension in the side its neck.

"What am I to do with you?" he asks, though the question is rhetorical and Chase doesn't even hear it.

"What am I to do with you that isn't going to drag you down further?"

_What am I to do that's not going to drag me down, too?_

A voice in the back of his own head whispers _just comfort him._

House is surprised that the voice is his own.

"What am I going to do?" he whispers, defying himself as he acts upon his own subconscious encouragement.

He pets Chase's head and skin because it's what they do in the movies. There's no emotional connection with the act because he's removed himself from it in order to preserve himself. He does not feel warmth welling up inside of him as Chase begins to calm and the spell over him begins to dissipate.

The truth is, he feels nothing at all. Nothing but the beating of Chase's heart, a biological thing rather than an emotion one.

It's necessity that makes him act, not compassion.

House fears the day it becomes obligation.

(*)

He watches Chase sat at the table with a pen in his hand and a blank page spread out in front of him. The pages are empty but he concentrates hard on them as if looking for something that should fill them. House watches as his hand moves up to his temple as he rubs it, trying to stimulate something, anything.

"Try free-associating," House says quietly. "Isn't that what your therapists tell you to do?"

It's supposed to trigger subconscious memory.

Chase looks up, his eyes now dry of tears, and he smiles as if it's the greatest idea anyone has ever put forth.

"I'll try," he says, willing to do anything right about now, to jump into a fire if House were to ask him to.

House won't ask him to do that – but, he might just burn him.

House doesn't feel like he's betraying Chase when he picks up the phone, nor does he feel like he's been unnecessarily cruel. It is, in fact, necessity that drives him to this point. It's ugly. It's unpleasant. It's not idea, but Wilson was right. Wilson was right as he placed that torn up paper in his hands and told him "Call this man."

The truth is, House is frightened of what he's capable of. He's frightened of the anger that Chase riled up in him as he cradled him on the ground. He's frightened by the tension in his arms as he fought against the urge to do something he'd later regret because deep down he's out of his depth.

He's scared of making matters worse.

They say that Christmas time is the time when everything comes to a head; when the close proximity of family and friends is what drives home truths to their off-cliff deaths.

House has reached that point. He reached that point when he looked down at that shaking, trembling body in his arms and he wanted to snuff the life out of it.

As Chase busies himself with random words and pictures scrawled out onto plain white pages, House turns his back on him and whispers words he might see as treachery down a sterile phone line.

There is no joy in this. There is only duty of care.

"Doctor Emmett," he says, as quiet as he can. "Yeah, yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too, but this isn't a social call."

He closes his eyes as he imagines coming up for air from that river that Wilson was speaking of.

He imagines a weight being lifted off his shoulders as he says three words that might change everything.

"It's about Chase."

(*)

Chase asks him to tell him stories when he gets off the phone, stories of his past, stories of his antics, stories of the person he once was.

He remembers things, things that are insignificant in normal circumstances but when his eyes light up with that devilish sparkle, House knows one day he'll be back.

It makes what he just did all the harder.

It makes his previous acts all the more difficult to endure.

Tonight, as he doses him up on his meds and tells him that things will get better for him, he can't help but feel that he's lying to Chase; that he's being mistruthful and deceitful and callous and unkind.

When Chase looks up at him with trusting eyes that say sorry, thank you and even "I love you', on some level, he has to turn his head and look away.

Nobody said this was going to be easy.

Nobody said it would be this hard, either.


	59. Chapter 73

_Just another little chapter :) _

_Am losing the will to live with House these days. It's kind of making me question just about everything to do with the show. They've taken my favourite characters in directions which make no sense to me and it doesn't sit right in my head. It's also making me question my writing, left me feeling uninspired, hence updates being so few and far between. I'm hoping those reading are not sick of me. _

_Drop me a line some time. I seriously need the encouragement. And P.S, Calico, dear, if you are there, I just tried to reply to your PM and it would not let me. I shall try it again in the morning. _

_

* * *

_

He imagines Of Mice and Men, dreams up Lennie and George, one man so wonderfully trusting and the other in such a dire state of hopelessness. He imagines the lies that one told the other, lies to protect him, lies to make his last moments on Earth seem hopeful, rather than hopeless; beautiful, rather than persecuted.

He wonders if Chase wants to 'live off the fat of the land' and hide away from the rest of the world or whether he wants to exist within it. Then, he imagines what it would be like to place a gun to Chase's head just like their intruder did only to pull the trigger and watch every bit of the neurologists' grotesque masterpiece paint the walls a dark shade of red because it seems kinder than letting him live in such limbo.

George killed Lennie to save him from insufferable pain yet the lies he told, they were beautiful lies.

They were perfect.

House tells his own as he informs Chase that he's driving him out of the city for awhile, away from the noise, away from the lights, away from the folly of Christmas. It's a great place they're going to. They have widescreen TV and great big gardens all covered in snow and a lake that people stupidly go skating on. They have a world class chef and all of the guests get to choose whatever they want to eat. On Sundays there is entertainment on in the Great Hall. Chase smiles and asks if it's fat old couples ballroom dancing with their hair in perms and their dickie bows tied too tightly.

House laughs at Chase's enthusiasm; laughs because he doesn't know what he'd do if he didn't laugh.

They packed a weekend bag with Chase's toothbrush and his favourite shirt.

He wasn't 'with it' enough to ask why House didn't pack one, too.

It's only when they pull up to the 'haven' that Chase begins to realise this isn't an impromptu road trip but something altogether more underhanded. There are large iron gates out front, a driveway that reminds him of something out of an 1800s British novel. The lanterns that glow in the early evening light flicker against the middle-blue sky. Outside in a parking bay are two unused ambulances and a sign that says "admissions", white against red in big, block letters.

The building itself is beautiful. Stone-brick. Ornate, even.

What it is, however, becomes obvious.

"Don't freak out on me," House says quietly as he notes his passenger's sudden shift in mood. "It's everything I said it was and more. You get your own room, Chase. It's more than I got. You get your own TV."

Don't fret, he pleads. I didn't _really_ lie.

Not in the strictest sense.

"What is this place?" Chase asks, his voice increasing in pitch as his panic rises. "House, what_ is_ this place?"

He looks like he's going to open the car door and fly away.

"It's a clinic. Strictly private, Chase. That way you don't have to worry about vagrants off the street being brought in to silence the voices in their methylated heads. It comes highly recommended. I wanted to transfer here myself during my time at Mayfield but they didn't have a space for me."

"Why am I here?"

"Because you need more than I can give you and it'd be unfair and irresponsible of me to pretend otherwise."

It's the simplest version of the answer that House could come up with.

It doesn't cut it at all.

(*)

They don't exactly 'hold' him, these large men in sterile clothing, but their intentions are clear. To coax him. To keep him.

To prevent him from leaving.

This isn't a secure facility – but, there are restrictions on the patient's movements.

"No," Chase says because it's dawning on him, now, the truth, the fact of the matter. It's dawning on him that House intends to leave him here. "You can't."

It's disbelief, pure and simple.

"No, really, you can't."

It scares him to have such little control over his own life and to know that no matter what he says the decision has been made.

There's a man with greying hair and small glasses stood in front of him. Chase swears he's seen him before but he doesn't remember, doesn't remember the external assessment that House demanded, the second opinion on his prognosis from a man ahead in his field.

Dr Martin Emmett is world renowned for his work with post-traumatic brain injury and associated stress disorders.

He's also terribly expensive but Wilson called in a favour.

"Mr Chase, I'm sure you'll feel much better once you sit down and have a drink. I understand this is a shock to you but we only want what's best for you. We've spoken to your doctors and they think it's a good idea."

"Best? A good idea? For me?"

"Yes, Chase," House says, gently. "For you."

"Why are you doing this?"

The voice, a childlike voice, whispers "I said I was sorry."

He said he was sorry for what he did.

"I've been doing better, haven't I? I've been doing good until – "

_Until that incident. _

_Until my security was shattered by a person invading our home who threatened me and hurt me and pulled the ground out from under me… _

"House, please. You said you'd keep me out of places like this. You _promised_. I can do better. I can _do_ better. I _have_ been doing better."

House says nothing. He says nothing because he's dumbed by his own sense of regret at breaking a promise he made to a kid that has forever been let down by those that were meant to give a damn.

He doesn't tell Chase that he'll return for him on Monday. He doesn't tell him that this is just a weekend thing; a respite break so that he can get his head together and so Chase can be given intensive care he so badly needs.

He does not tell him that this is only temporary; that he would never let him go just like that, would _never_ abandon him in the manner that Chase believes he is abandoning him.

"House," Chase whispers, a broken plea, and then louder. A cry. A yell. **"House."**

"Just go," Emmett tells him. "Robert will be fine."

The cries become more distant as he's led away.

It's interesting to note he doesn't struggle.

"He doesn't like to be called Robert," House mumbles, as if he alone could know such an intimate thing. "There are a lot of things he doesn't like. He likes to sleep with the light on but it's not because he's afraid of the dark. It's because he finds it difficult to switch off when there's nothing he can focus his eyes on. He's on ambient for sleep. I've been reducing his dosage and hoping to move him onto a placebo but - "

" - We'll do fine, Dr House."

If House hears the words of assurance he doesn't make it known.

"Cold water gives him a headache. So do loud noises. He suffers with migraines but he has medication for that. He has medication for most things. They think we should just dope him up and have done with it. Get him off their hands. Get him off their conscience."

Fumbling and desperate, House searches his pockets because this is important. In all of his accomplishments he has never connected with a patient in the same way he has connected with Chase.

"Damn it, I forgot to bring his schedule. I had it all written down."

"Dr House…"

"I have him on bolus IV antibiotics once a week just to keep him on top of things. He's on long term meds for his lung problems. He's so prone to infection."

"We have his records, House. We know exactly what his regime is."

He doesn't listen to the gentle, soothing voice that attempts to tell him that all is well. He's too lost in his guilt, his paranoia, his idea that nobody could ever treat Chase in the way he deserves.

"I, uh, I have his notebook with me. He got it for Christmas. Oh, and his iPod. He's getting used to technology. You know how it is. Can you make sure he gets them?"

"I'll do just that, House, now please."

The hand on his shoulder digs in deep, brings him to his senses.

"Please, House. Go and get yourself a cup of coffee and try not to worry. He'll be fine."

"Will he?"

He doesn't know where the anger comes from.

"Will he? Because, as far as I can see I'm leaving him behind when I promised I never would. I'm lying to him when I said I'd never lie."

"You need a break. It's understandable. And, he needs more structured care, even if only temporarily."

House feels like his head is caving in. He feels like his temples are collapsing in on themselves and his skull is digging pathways into his brain.

In the distance he can still hear Chase calling his name, a weakening cry that softens with every utterance. He wonders if they've sedated him; if they've 'given him something to help him calm down', a euphemism for 'giving him something to control him'. He made it clear that Chase was not to be subjected to such treatment unless he was endangering himself.

House, himself, has seen the young man choke himself into a panic attack through fear and fear alone…

It distracts him.

It hurts him.

"I'll have someone call you in a few hours to let you know how he's doing. In the meantime, you should try to relax a little. Enjoy the time you've got to yourself. God knows, you look like you need it."

It's true.

It's true that when House looks in the mirror, these days, he sees nothing but a man that's ticking over looking back. He sees a drowning man, a man that cannot stay afloat, a man that tries so hard to do what's right but can't see the woods for the trees.

He turns around but it's like walking against winds, the pressure of every step almost enough to send him flying backwards. It's a struggle. It's a struggle to walk out of those doors knowing that he's leaving something behind, even if only for a short while.

It's a struggle to leave him behind at all.

Chase sits on the edge of a bed that he's been designated in a small room at the end of a long, long corridor. He didn't fail to notice, even in his distress, that the door locks on the outside. They promise him he won't be imprisoned here, that the locks are for special circumstances only, but that doesn't make him any less captive. Not with the key pads that require strict access codes in order to release doors on the corridor, nor with what looks to be security that guards both exits.

He can't help but notice that the bed is aptly designed for use of restraints, if necessary, but they're not tying him down. He'll die before he'll let them do that.

His eyes stream. They're red and raw.

House is the onion that's caused them to bleed.

There's a fir tree outside of his window that's decorated with tinsel and brightly coloured balls and he wants to kick it to pieces but he can't because the window's locked and he's three floors up. Instead, he satisfies himself by clutching that jug of water that sits innocently on the clinical bedside table, staring at it resentfully and hatefully before throwing it against the wall.

He watches as the water splashes out all over the floor, a beautiful mess of his own doing.

He tries to see his reflection in the liquid but he sees nothing.

Nothing at all.


	60. Chapter 74

_I have to say thank you to all of those that left messages and sent PMs after the last chapter. It's nice to know I'm not the only one suffering with the present season. Some find it totally squee, others find it intolerable. I'm the latter, I'm afraid. _

_I guess when I'm feeling disinterested in the show I lose all sense of writing. I love sense of the characters. I wonder what on Earth the writers are thinking by developing them in such a way. It does make me question everything. It makes me feel like my attempts to stay 'in character' are a complete and utter waste of time because even those that get paid to do so don't bother. _

_So, I guess I will just plod along with this humble little fic and hope you all don't abandon it the way I feel like abandoning the show _

(*)

House eats steak in pepper sauce, cooked blue and, as it bleeds onto his plate he bleeds out too. Verbally. Emotionally.

He analyses it as he might analyse patient, considers the state of life as in death.

He cannot leave well alone.

"The tendons are shot to pieces," he says, as he idly pokes his fork around the meat in a less than surgical manner. "The animal was probably riddled with arthritis before it was hung upside down and bled dry for my pleasure."

"It's good steak," Wilson argues. "You like this place."

"I'm just telling it like I see it."

"You're picking. You're looking for something to complain about so you can feel better. It's catharsis."

"Oh, cut out the amateur psychobabble, James. You chose oncology. Get over it."

Wilson shrugs.

He holds a forkful of lettuce next to his lips and House wants to knock it away. He has no idea why Wilson chose this restaurant in all its pretentious unglory.

House just wanted to stay at home and drown his sorrows.

"I'm just saying. It's perfectly natural to feel negative. Guilty, even."

"Guilty? You said it yourself, the crazy kid needed a padded room for his own safety. He was practically foaming at the mouth."

"I didn't say that."

"But, you _thought_ it. Thinking about your neighbour's wife is as bad as sleeping with her. The bible says."

"I think a lot of things. Believe it or not, they're not all bad."

House thinks that most of them are.

Chase doesn't think at all, doesn't_ speak _at all, a casual act of defiance he could keep up for weeks if necessary.

This is rock-solid hush. This is institutionalised silence, the kind that seeps into muffled, padded walls that hold the sedated screams of the poor souls that were repressed before.

So far, they haven't tried to force him, though he's focused enough to fortify himself against even the most persuasive of persons.

He doesn't want to be here.

Like a teenager, he will push the boundaries and see where the give and take might be. He will clam up when spoken to just to prove he can maintain control.

"We only want to help you, Robert. Do you not want to help yourself?"

They give him an option he naturally doesn't take. Why should he? He will take 'the hard way' before he'll let himself be walked over.

He glares defiantly at their attempts to coax him to comply.

Then, he simply sabotages them.

()

House used to savour the silence of his place, the peaceful emptiness of an uninhabited space where he could be alone and wallow in it, if he saw fit.

What was he thinking?

He opens the door (still broken but holding firm) and all that greets him is a place devoid of life, the solemn quiet of a single bachelor's 'pad' that holds no company, no spirit, no entertainment whatsoever.

Again, he asks, what was he thinking?

This wasn't 'for the best' at all.

Being placed in institutional care will not benefit Chase, not when the piano in the corner nurtures him so fully and the pictures on the walls draw forth such lingering thoughts from the boy.

More loudly this time, the voice mocks him.

_What were you thinking?_

He doesn't remove his jacket, doesn't throw himself onto the couch for a moment's contemplation. He turns around and leaves, abandons the peace in favour of the challenge in all it's blond, blue eyed beauty.

When he arrives at that clinical place he's told visiting hours are over. It doesn't equate. He's more than that, more than a visitor. They're trying to put a limit on his role and he doesn't appreciate it. Like a father denied visitation rights to his child, his back goes up.

"I'm not here to visit."

He places his hand down on the front desk and he patronises. He does it because he can. He does it because he wants to.

"Take a look at the admission sheet. I signed him in."

"I'm afraid Mr Chase isn't in any fit state to see you right now. I suggest you come back tomorrow."

"I brought him here. Now I want to take him home. You're going to pack his little weekend bag and we'll be on our merry way."

She has a flustered look. Her expression, it suggests one who might buckle under pressure.

House presses on.

"Sir, he's sleeping. He's under medication. He's in a quiet room."

House doesn't wait for further information, just walks beyond. He places his foot past the boundary and dares her to stop him.

"Please, Sir, you can't go up there."

House pauses. He looks at this woman with accusation in his eyes.

"Is there a reason he's been secluded?"

She takes a deep breath.

It's as if she's preparing herself.

"There was an incident today."

"What kind of incident?"

"I'm sure his doctor will be happy to discuss it with you if you'd like to -"

"There's nothing to discuss. I'm taking him home with me. There's no court order. He was here under my instruction which, I might add, clearly stated he be treated leniently. I'm his legal guardian."

"I understand that, Sir, but we can't release him until he's no longer under the influence. It's for insurance purposes."

"I'm a doctor. I can handle a medicated patient."

"I don't doubt you can but I have rules."

House does not comprehend rules, especially if they work against him.

This woman should've been warned.

House again dares her to react when he disregards her protestations and makes his way into the restricted area.

She doesn't follow physically - but, she does call for back up.

()

"As Nurse McIver stated, there was an incident," the doctor tells him softly as House assesses the 'damage'.

Chase is clearly anaesthetised, in a dull, deep sleep that's not of his own making. He's not restrained, though blunt red marks on his wrists indicate that he was.

House touches one arm, a finger brushing over the reddened skin. He asks a question that does not make it to be verbalised but the doctor hears it loud and clear.

He's seen this many times before.

"He was showing signs of extreme stress. We were worried he was heading towards a seizure so we acted."

A pause, just to set the scene.

"He didn't appreciate that."

The hand that touches House makes him want to scream.

"He presents as very troubled. He was non-compliant from the minute you left him. Aggressive. Stubborn. Evasive. He negates all attempts of engagement. There's a definite oppositional behaviour pattern there."

He says it like it's a bad thing.

"When we tried to get near him he became violent. He threw a chair."

"He's protesting," House says quietly, his voice holding a raw semblance of a smile. "He's asserting his own control over the situation."

"By exhibiting violence? That's not healthy behaviour."

"Trust me, you didn't know him before."

Provoking a response was something he constantly attempted, had tried to get Chase to give something back. He pushed him in the hopes that he'd snap.

Chase never snapped, was too scared to.

He allowed himself to be walked over because he wasn't strong enough.

"So finally, he learns."

"This isn't a positive thing, Dr House. It's cause for serious concern."

"Are you serious? This is something I've worked towards for years."

The doctor stands incredulous as House withdraws his demands, as he touches Chase's rising, falling chest and relinquishes him.

Part of him wishes Chase were awake and alert so that he'd push him away physically.

He'd be as proud as the day he'd reeled back and hit him.

"Tell him I'll see him on Monday," he says, as he gathers himself to leave. He'll deal with the solitude if Chase is 'progressing' so wonderfully. "Keep up the good work."

In this moment the doctor, in all his years of experience and expertise, is lost for words.

What good work is this?

What, indeed, is Dr House hoping to achieve?


	61. Chapter 75

_For anyone who is still reading – here is another part. It took awhile in coming because I'm still totally uninspired by the show. So, what is it now? The whore arc is gone so Chase has gone back to invisible? Sigh. _

_Hope everyone is well. Again, if you can find the time to drop me a line do so. I need all the help I can get. Suggestions are a bonus, too. I work better when challenged!_

_Hugs to all_

(*)

"How did you get the bruise on your head?"

He spouts the cliché, the lie, the extract from the Bible of the Abused that comes up in cop dramas, battered wives tales and courtrooms across the land. .

"I walked into a door."

His dull blue eyes shift a little, conscious of the dishonesty but not for the reason the doctor thinks. The older man imagines a beaten, vulnerable man unable to comprehend what is happening to him, sheathing the truth in order to save from being further harmed.

Chase looks like he's protecting someone.

"You walked into a door?"

"What do _you _think?"

"I think that it doesn't look accidental."

"Oh, really? Then, how did I get the bruises on my arms? Were they accidental? What about the ones on my wrists?"

He doesn't sound angry. He's incapable of that. They were so concerned about panic induced seizure or stroke that he can barely react at all. He is but a mechanical version of himself, a computer started up in safe mode. He is blank and monotone but his words are colourful, indeed.

All he knows is that House would not do this to him. He also knows that House essentially did do this to him and that short-circuits him, somehow.

They keep trying to see inside his head, figure out the reasons behind his behaviours when there are no reasons. There's no logic to a damaged thought-process, no reason behind a mangled mind.

It's laughable.

He smiles.

"Guess those straps and needles just found their way to my body because they took a wrong turn somewhere."

"We restrained you because your BP was dangerously high. Your behaviour was erratic. You were hyperventilating. You were having absence episodes and involuntary spasms. You were close to seizure or stroke or worse."

"So, I wasn't cute and quiet."

If the doctor were to take a deep breath it would indicate his frustration with the lack of understanding. He restrains himself. He answers in flat, masculine monotone.

"Your safety is of great importance to us. We're not looking to hurt you."

They aren't 'out to get' him. That is an inaccuracy, a paranoid perception from a traumatised man, a man who still sees a sharp, metal object pressing into his skull each and every time he closes his eyes.

Is his behaviour any less 'normal' than that of a man with all of his faculties? Again, laughable.

"You asked me how I got the bruise. How did I get the bruise? Why don't you ask House?"

"Because I have no interest in House. But, I am interested in you."

"Ask House. Ask him about the guy who had the gun pressed to my head. Ask him about the man he fucked over who wanted to get one over on him. Is that accidental?"

No.

No, but, it does make Chase sound delusional, a man who cannot distinguish between thought and reality. He can see the thoughts ticking over in this refined man's head. He might be slow but he's not stupid. He can analyse. He can relate.

He sighs.

"And, now you think I have a vivid imagination."

"You thought one of the nurses was your mother earlier."

"That was different. I was confused. Not to mention you had me doped up to my eyeballs. Are you going to hold that against me?"

"Nobody is holding anything against you.."

"Oh, you and your doctor speak. It's all so passive-aggressive."

"Nobody's being passive-aggressive here, Robert. We're just talking."

It's frustration that gets the better of him, though he can barely express as much. It shows in his eyes, though, fire where water was before.

"Don't call me Robert," he whispers. "Please, don't call me Robert."

"Does it upset you to be called Robert?"

It's a name he associates with all of the people that left him. His mother. His father. His wife.

House never called him Robert because House never left.

House left now, so where does that leave him?

"Why is your name such an issue for you? Is it something you identify with in a negative light? Is it a shame to you?"

"I just – "

He pauses. Struggles.

"Go on."

"I just – "

He just can't grasp the concept that's teetering on the edge of his thoughts. He can't grab hold of the words that explain his dissolution with his given name. He can't describe the fact that Robert is the boy who was born and the boy that lived but that Robert died along with his mother and Chase is somebody else entirely.

"You seem upset."

"I _am_ upset."

"Was Dr Robert Chase not the name on your certificate? Was that not a man that achieved more at a young age than others could ever imagine?"

Dr Robert Chase. A trigger, of sorts. A name, but something more.

"I was always Dr Chase."

"Dr _Robert _Chase."

"No –"

He feels antagonised. Enraged.

Then he just feels pain.

His hands fly to his head as a 'vision' envelops him; an angry black man in a bed screaming _"Don't condemn politics you are not part of, Dr Robert Chase. You're nothing but a child to me. What could you possibly know of turmoil?"_

It's the anger that brings forth the image of rage. It also brings forth guilt and confusion though he cannot possibly fathom why. He looks to the left, to the right, his eyes searching for purchase on the world but all he can see is this black man, solid as day, calling him by his 'full achievement'.

_Dr Robert Chase. _

"Chase, is there a problem? Are you in pain?"

He looks to be, his throbbing temple and his panic-stricken eyes, his red face, his mental confusion. He shakes his head as if to clear the image – or, as if to make it clearer.

"N-no," he replies. "No, I'm fine."

"_Would you end a man's life if it meant saving your country, Robert Chase? Would you burn down a village of twenty to save a population of thousands?"_

The words swim into reality and then out of it.

So does Robert Chase.

"Are you seeing something, Chase? Is it something you need to speak about?"

How can he speak of what he doesn't understand?

"_Only those in a position of power can understand the pain of taking a life for the good of another."_

"What is this?" he asks, though to nobody in particular.

Perhaps he's asking himself.

He feels the doctor's hand on his arm but the hand is white, not black, and the look in those grey eyes is soft, not accusatory.

He brings himself back to Earth as the image of coffee-coloured skin fades away and with it the overwhelming emotions such a face brought forth in him.

"You're here, Robert," he hears, softly spoken but meaningful, and the doctor's tactics work.

Blue eyes bear into him.

Breathing calms and an expression dissipates, and Chase tells him once again "Don't call me Robert."

It is to be his 'grounding' name, his trigger word.

The thing which will pass through all layers of delusion and remembrance and pierce him, somehow.

(*)

The 'session' goes well in a kind of unforeseen and unplanned manner, a 'happy accident', one might say, as buttons are pushed and doors are opened. Chase's psyche is a stormy sea yet one that is conductive to changes in pressure and the pull of the moon.

This doctor represents the lunar functions. His words, his movements and his pressure points all bring forth waves that Chase was averse to control.

A whole chapter opens for Chase where it had been hidden before. Images come forth and then glide away and he grasps at them with both hands, pulling them back to the forefront.

He's not dying – but, his life flashes before his eyes yet again in a series of sharp, swift images that he feels as well as sees.

"I want to stop," he says quietly as he's forced to examine himself.

"In time," he's told.

"I'm not ready for this."

"You wouldn't be responding if you were not ready to, Robert."

That name. That name again.

He seethes.

This is how his authoritarians used to deal with him when he clammed up, when he shut down. They'd confine him to a corner and turn up the heat. He'd simmer for awhile. Then, he'd explode.

It's out of character when he swears – but, he does.

His words push forth from behind the gritted gates of his teeth and he demands his fucking notebook.

(*)

He's ignitable today, a combustible thing that burns itself out after seething and shining for more than a second.

He knows only too well this memory might not last as he scribbles it down onto a page in jagged, slashing letters that almost slice the paper through. To the doctor he looks desperate. Unstable. It's amazing he can 'look' anything at all with the medication sloshing around his veins but that's what adrenaline does. It can fight off anaesthetic. It can bypass muscle relaxants.

The doctor continues to talk, gentle yet forceful, to see what will happen next.

"You're doing good, Robert."

He sees the flinch but watches as it goes ignored. Chase knows this is a tactic now, the use of the name, the use of the agitation it causes the patient to have his wishes ignored.

He watches as Chase succumbs to silence with the pen in his hand and the pages finally drafted upon, painted where they were empty before.

It's like a dam has opened, curtains drawn to reveal the acts that went before. Chase fills pages with images to digress, thoughts to latch onto and pour over at will. He no longer needs a voiceover or soliloquy, no addressing him as the audience to let him know what occurred in his own life. It's not the whole of it but something has opened for him and he fights to hold on to it.

"You're doing good."

"So you keep saying."

"Just let it all flow out onto the page."

"I'm _trying_ to but you just keep talking."

The pressure cooker seems to be intensifying and no longer is the doctor welcome.

"Just leave me alone with my thoughts."

The wish is complied with.

He's left alone, every presence an intrusion into his vivid Blasts from the Past.

The doctor picks up the telephone.

In a few simple words he warns House away, cites monumental progress as the reason he should not return.

"He's opening up to himself. He's self-soothing. He's remembering."

"I've had him at that point time and time again. It never lasts."

"He's writing it all down."

"He doesn't need hospitalisation to be able to write, Doctor."

"No. But, he does need to be away from whatever abusive scenario gave him the bruises on his face and body and if I can give him that reprieve for even a moment I'm going to use his progress as a bargaining chip."

"A bargaining chip?"

"Yes."

It takes awhile to sink in but when it does it's poisonous.

"You think I did that? You think I slapped him around, Doctor?"

"Well, he certainly didn't slap himself. He tells me an _intruder_ broke into his home and held a gun to his head."

"And, you're saying that's not the truth?"

"I'm saying there's been no police report filed. That's telling enough."

Silence.

Silence on the line because House knows how that looks, knows how far fetched it seems.

"Look, he thinks I'm coming for him on Monday and I'm not going to let him down. I'm not going to abandon him like his old man did. If you want to play the domestic violence card on me then you're going to have to do a better job of it than this. For one thing, it's not true. For another thing, he hasn't filed a complaint."

"He's not in his right mind. I've seen plenty of patients that are unable to process logical thoughts when it comes to loved ones. They wouldn't be here if they were well."

"But, you just said he was making progress."

The fact he does it without House's presence wounds the man.

It also challenges him.

"Look, Dr House. You passed him into my care because you admitted you needed a break. You couldn't cope. You felt he needed something more structured even if only for a short while."

"That doesn't mean I hit him."

"No."

The 'but' goes unspoken.

"You told me to do what I felt necessary for Chase and what I feel necessary is to keep him here for a little while longer. Like I said, he's making – "

" – progress. Sure. But, you're still threatening me. You're still holding this warped idea of physical abuse over my head because you think it'll give you a harder bargaining chip."

"No," the doctor says, and it's the truth. There is no malice in this. There is no ulterior motive. "No, I just want to protect my patient."

My patient.

Mine.

House's possessive streak is thick and vast, runs through every pore and every vein in his body.

The fact the doctor called Chase 'his' patient is enough to drive him to madness.

"I'm coming to collect him tomorrow morning _Doctor_. If you want to accuse me of slapping him around you can look me in the eye when you do it. Whatever you can do for him I can certainly do one better."

There is a pause. It's momentary but it's telling.

The answer is a direct hit. It's not malicious. It's designed to show a loving family member their limitations in a way they'll understand.

"Then, why haven't you?"

Why haven't you done better, the doctor asks?

House, unfortunately, cannot answer.

The only thing he says is "I'll see you tomorrow."


	62. Chapter 76

_Further mini chapter._

_Thank you all for your words of wisdom. It does make me write faster!_

_Hmm. Is House heading for his own locked doors?_

()

"My name is Gregory House and I'm a vicious abuser in a dinner stained string vest."

These are the words he uses, AA style, to his 'sponsors'. Taub. Foreman. The idiot new minion he won't get attached to because she'll be out on that moral little ass of hers when Thirteen returns.

He calls her Marshall Mathers, wonders is she even knows who that is and, when she looks at him strangely he jumps on it.

"Something on your mind, Little Miss Eminem?"

She looks up from beneath third-grade 'bangs' and asks if she should be afraid of the vicious abuser. Clever girl, they tell him. Savant style, almost. Still, there's a distinct lack of common sense to her and House recognises it.

Still, he plays with her.

He plays with her the way he plays with them all.

"Oh, silly, you're a big, strong girl with all of your senses intact. No, this abuser only hits brain damaged former employees...which, granted, you might one day be. But, I digress, until you can't even tell me your own name I'd say you were safe.

She shifts in her seat, childish, ridiculous thing with her superhero alliterate name and her eagerness, God, her eagerness...

It almost reminds him of Chase's, though it seems a lifetime ago since he was that person.

Taub, the direct polarity to this girl, says nothing. He keeps it professional as he moves to attend to an old man's urine. He learned a long time ago not to open himself up to humiliation by giving a thought on House's personal life.

He never imagined Chase might personify that.

Foreman remains quiet for awhile, contemplating House's words. He ponders the tone, searching for sarcasm in the hopes that it was there. It would be both a moral, professional and human course of action he would willingly take if House raised a hand to Chase; if he saw fit to lose his temper with him.

House stares at him, analysing him. His eyes scan over Foreman's face with such rigour it can almost be felt.

He laughs then, out of place, a strange act.

"I can see your tiny brain ticking over. You're so obvious."

"Did you do it?" Foreman asks. He keeps emotion out of his voice. He learned that tone of voice can be the knife that cuts even if the words are toothless.

"Did I do what?"

"You know what."

The girlscout looks at her hands. She flutters her page. She has little understanding of male tension but the fact she is physically situated in the middle of it causes her discomfort.

She doesn't excuse herself. Not yet.

"Did I hit him? Is that what you're asking?"

"Wilson told me he wasn't in a good place."

"Right. Because that would give me even more reason to heap the suffering on him. You really think I'd thump the guy?"

Foreman sighs.

"You've done it before."

There's no revising the truth.

"You'd take pleasure in telling them that, wouldn't you?"

"I wouldn't lie. Not for you."

"Not like you lied for Chase, right? Mr accessory to -"

"That's enough, House."

He never would've completed the sentence. He just likes to put Foreman on edge.

Martha pipes up now. She finds words where they're not welcome. Her social skills are as underdeveloped as her breasts. She doesn't mean to be this way. There's no malice, just annoyance.

"You really hit a brain damaged man?"

As if it's that simple...

"No, he was smarter than you, then, not to mention prettier," House replies before staring at the girl.

She looks hurt. God, look at her face. As if realising, she wipes the look away. She paints on a stoic, careless expression but the damage is already done.

"Anyway, don't you have blood work to do?"

She doesn't pick up on the cue, tells House they found nothing but an elevated white cell count.

She doesn't move until House forces her to.

"Run the tests again. And, don't come back until you've found evidence of God in them."

She's a stumbling girl. She gathers her papers with such a distinct and awkward lack of grace that House wonders whether she's brain damaged too before settling on Asperger's.

As the door closes, Foreman releases the latch. He lets out what he's held back.

"Now that we're alone...did you lose it with him? He can be frustrating, granted, but -"

" - Christ, do I really need to answer that? He's trouble enough as it is without me adding to it. Why would I make my own life difficult?"

That is the truth as Foreman sees it.

House's main concern is always with himself.

"The problem is, Wilson's renowned pal thinks I did and he's trying to cut me off."

"Why does he think you hit him? There must be some reason."

"Yeah, because life's that neat."

He focuses his attention on the glass table and talks out loud.

"I was stupid to put him in that place. Shrinks are always trying to be heroes and putting their noses where they don't belong."

"He's concerned about his patient, House."

"Yeah. Real empathic to label the guy he lives with a fist-for-hire."

"I know it's a hard concept for you to grasp but the majority of doctors do actually care about the people they treat."

"The majority of doctors are glory hunters looking to play God - present company included."

"You think I want to play God?"

"I know you're not in this job out of the goodness of your heart. We're all egotistical."

Foreman doesn't rise to it. He knows there would be no point. Instead, he tries to find the point in House's revelation.

"So, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to talk to him? What_ did_ happen?"

House answers without reservation, without thought of consequence. He says it as if it's nothing.

"I'm going to go in there tomorrow and take him whether they like it or not. And, what happened is none of your business."

House, he doesn't help matters with his forceful thoughts and evasive answers. He's talking about abduction in a literal sense of the word. He's speaking about it so openly that some might wonder if he's looking to be talked out of it.

"I'm going to walk in and then walk out with him. I don't care what they say."

"Right," Foreman says. "Because that's a good idea."

"Do you have a better one? If I have to take him AMA I'll do that."

"And, if they call the cops?"

House thinks of the law. Then, he thinks of Chase, whose life contains barely an atom of the life that had been, barely a shred, and whose uncertainty was as desolate as any prison cell.

What if they call the cops?

"Let them."

Let them drag him away in handcuffs if they have to. At least Chase will see that, no matter what, he's worth fighting for - that, even if House leaves him he'll always come back.

He needs that security.

He needs that little drip-feed for his attachment and abandonment issues.

"You're really going to do this?"

The look of determination is louder than words. Foreman doesn't really need to ask.

He shakes his head.

"I think you're making a huge mistake, House."

"It's a good job I didn't ask for your opinion, then, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I guess it is."

Foreman wonders how many crimes he's to be privy to in relation to Chase.

Kidnap.

Possible assault.

Unruly use of an illegal substance.

Murder.

And, to think he's the one with the criminal record...

"Don't come crying to me to bail you out when it all goes wrong."

"I wouldn't dream of it. Being associated with a gangbanger probably wouldn't be such a good idea."

He always knows the right things to say, even in times of pressure.

He never fails in that respect.


	63. Chapter 77

_Sorry this took ages and I hope you are all still with me. Blame the show. Blame it's hopelessness for the lack of inspiration. Gah, I hate it when I no longer feel attached to a show I have loved for a long, long time. _

_Hope you are all doing fine and, as always, drop me a little line if there's any thoughts and requests/prompts/key words that I can work with. It does help. I always found that.  
_

(*)

Dr Emmett sits like a true listener should, back straight, hands resting softly in his lap and head tilted slightly forward. At sixty-three he gives the impression of a kindly old grandfather taking on the weight of everyone's worlds with a charming grace; a softness that belies the tough streak with which he successfully treats his patients.

He listens. He acts.

He's stern when necessary, gentle and kind when it benefits them the most.

House looks at this old man with his white doctor's jacket and his hair brushed back off his face and he wonders if this is what Wilson will become in years to come, a soft-spoken gentleman with a face that was clearly once handsome yet sags, now, like a worn, crumpled piece of paper.

"So," House says, maintaining his calm, "how's the young whippersnapper doing?"

"We've been having difficulties with him since he arrived."

"Yeah, unfortunately that's part of your job. I hate to tell you this but psych patients aren't exactly level headed. Neuro-psych patients are often even more difficult."

He taps his head and pulls a face. An enduring grimace.

"Something to do with the fact that, deep down, they know they were normal once and that this is all due to a tragic accident rather than a defect of the brain they were born with. That's gotta hurt, to know that if that piece of rock never fell on your head you'd be out getting laid instead of stuck in a rubber room, don't you think?"

Emmett ignores the diatribe. He's a focused individual who has learned over the years that people have a tendency to go 'off track' when it comes to loved ones. He learned the importance of sticking to the task at hand during many a familial meeting such as this one where excuses are made and wild theories explored in such vivid detail it's almost as if they're plausible.

The fact that House is a doctor makes his job a little more difficult.

"One thing that stands out is Mr Chase seems to have control issues."

"Such as?"

"Selective mutism. Refusing food and drink. Refusing medication."

"So, he doesn't want to talk to you, he's lost his appetite and he doesn't trust you not to turn him into a zombie. It's hardly surprising, is it? You're holding him against his will on my say so. He's acting up because he's angry with us. It's not unusual for him."

House doesn't like it when his words are taken down in note form but he understands the necessity.

Emmett looks him in the eye. He's searching for something, though House doesn't know what that 'something' might be.

"You're aware of the issues, Dr House?"

House shrugs, nonchalant.

"He talks when he wants to talk. He's been refusing food on off since he came out of his coma. He doesn't like taking pills. I guess you could say he's a quirky little tyke."

He smiles. Emmett, unsurprisingly, doesn't.

"You don't think these are damaging to his health? You said he was prone to infection. Could it not be that he's malnourished and under-medicated?"

"What, you think I don't bribe him into swallowing his meds and feed him nasogastrically when he's unconscious if I have to? He wakes up feeling full and doesn't know why. I remind him he's not so good with his memory and that he really, really enjoyed the steak I cooked for him when he was watching the cricket. His condition is a funny little plus point at times."

It _could_ be true. It _might_ be true.

Emmett listens. House knows he's good at his job. He also knows that if the roles were reversed he'd be as cautious as the old man is. House himself has received inpatient psychiatric treatment. His stability and trustworthiness, as such, could easily be questioned but this doctor is a professional. He's dealt with persons with such far-fetching mental illness that his palate is as delicate as that of a wine-taster when it comes to them. He can see the subtleties. He can tell if a man is trustworthy or not just by listening to them speak.

"So…yeah. I've been known to cheat the system. _His_ system."

"Is that your solution?"

"It's either that or let him starve."

He knows how it sounds. Deceitful, even unpleasant. The question of human rights might come into it if Chase were not declared mentally incapable on some level and House were not legally entitled to make his choices for him.

Still, Emmett sees it for what it is.

"You're not averse to underhanded tactics in order to get him to comply."

"I figure it's better than letting him get away with murder and die."

Figuratively and literally.

"Your technique seems a little…avoidant of the issues."

"And yours is anything different? Let me see. You've got him on anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic and…what else? He's not anxious and he's not psychotic. It makes him easier though, doesn't it?"

"It makes him safer, at least physiologically. Is it not wiser to tranquillise him than allow him to work himself up into a seizure? Like you said – better than letting him die. If the ends justify the means, isn't that right, Dr House?"

House smirks at that one.

"And you're calling _me_ avoidant. You shrinks are all such blatant hypocrites."

Dr Emmett doesn't mean to be. He just worries for his patients.

He just tries his best to be objective and subjective where the situation calls for it.

He sighs. He leans forward and House sees it as an attempt to connect with him. He accepts it, embraces it, almost, if it means developing a relationship with this man which will make things easier.

He understands the power he has in his wrinkled old finger and he doesn't want to put anything in jeopardy, here, despite the fact he'll resort to abduction if he has to.

He'd rather do this the easy way.

"I'm just a little concerned, Dr House. I'm not saying you're an incapable guardian but I wonder if you're acting in his best interests by consistently hiding the truth from him. He seems…delusional, at times."

"Oh. The intruder thing?"

"Amongst other things."

"That wasn't a delusion. He wasn't lying. I don't trust the police. I didn't want to trust you but I had no other option."

That rattles the boat a little. The 'dynamic', it changes a little when House acknowledges the truth is as Chase described it.

He wonders if the tag of 'delusional patient' slipped a little with the revelation.

He knows his tag of 'acceptable guardian' probably took a hit.

"So you let a mentally unstable young man with severe processing difficulties feel unsafe in his own home, a home that you provided for him, because you don't like cops?"

"I just didn't want the authorities picking inside of his head when I'd dealt with the situation. What happens in my apartment is my business."

"Until it affects somebody else…"

Defensive, now, in true House style. His back is up high. His fur prickles. He feels attacked when there's no attack at all.

"I thought I could deal with it. I thought I could deal with him."

"And, you couldn't."

There it is.

There it is in three simple words; the truth, the painful truth.

House couldn't deal with it.

He sinks a little, now. The bravado falls. The shell is cast aside. Dr Emmett sees House for what he truly is in one little exchange that might, indeed, change everything.

It doesn't occur to House that the doctor facilitated the whole breakthrough.

"It was just too big. I misread. I misjudged."

Interestingly, he doesn't say 'I was wrong'. That would make him culpable.

House is never culpable.

His eye contact fails him. He begins to fixate on a certificate on a frame on the wall. He resents it. He resents it because the words on that paper indicate this man in front of him, this old man who looks so fragile but isn't, is so much more qualified to take care of Chase than he is.

Sensing the fear, the old man calls a truce.

"I can help you," Dr Emmett says, finally. "You have his best interests at heart but the truth is, he needs more."

Softly, now. The kindly grandfather. Coaxing. Hoping for delivery.

"I can help you – if you'll let me."

"You're not keeping him here," House demands, though he's softening. He's becoming flexible. "By all means, point me in the right direction, but I told you I wasn't leaving him here and that fact remains."

"I'll release him to you on the condition that you comply with me."

It's taking the power, in a lot of ways.

But, it's also returning it.

House stares at him.

"I'm listening."

(*)

Chase is sat on the edge of his bed with his feet barely touching the ground. To his left is a small bag containing his belongings and to his right is an empty space.

He looks so small.

He looks so alone.

House watches him through the window, watches as Dr Emmett reels off words that House finds overwhelming and scenarios he finds terrifying.

"In essence," the doctor states, "he's just a boy."

That's Chase.

The essence of a child.

The essence of House's child, and God, he doesn't want to fail him.

House looks at him now whilst he's unawares, _really_ looks at him, looks at the fractious soul that's pulling itself together with such fragile, awkward gracelessness and he feels a physical pang.

It burns his stomach.

It pulls at him.

It stabs him hard, knife-like.

It tears him apart.

"He needs boundaries but he needs flexibility. He needs gentleness but he needs pressure, too. He needs protection but he has to learn that he is at least partly in control of himself. It's what he's struggling with the most. You mustn't lie to him, House. It'll give him an altered perception of the world. There's a fine balance that needs to be addressed to get the best out of him."

He'll do anything now. House will do anything.

"What do you need from me?" he says, submissive as he's never been, giving in where he never thought he'd give in.

It's all down to that boy, that essence of a boy.

The thought of seeing harm come to Chase, now, is so utterly painful that House would even amend _himself _to avoid it.


	64. Chapter 78

_Tiny little update aw. _

_Thanks for the reviews/ideas/PMs. It seems a lot of people think along the same lines as me re: the actual characterisation this season. I'm just hoping the Huddy dies away soon so we can get back to what's actually interesting and stimulating. _

_So…here is some adolescent brat Chase. I figure he'll be a handful in coming days for poor, taxed House. _

(*)

He bolts.

His attempt at escape is somewhat pathetic in that he makes it as far as the first locked door and can go no further. He feels a strange urge to knock on it quietly and hope somebody opens from the other side to let him through. Instead he presses his forehead against it.

"You don't need to run, Chase."

"I need to go…I need to go…"

He feels a warm hand on his neck, the voice of his doctor whispering gently in his ear trying to coax him down.

"You _can_ go."

You can go, he hears, somewhere in the recess of his panicking mind. It was instinctive, this need to flee, to bolt, the by-product of locked doors and sterile incarceration.

His mind sought freedom the minute the door was pushed open.

The minute he saw House he needed to get away.

Without thinking, he hugs the doctor, wraps his arms around him and presses his face into his neck. He closes his eyes. He inhales the man's spirit, it seems, feels a hand between his shoulder blades telling him that everything's fine.

"You can go. He's come to take you home. You can leave. Everything's okay."

"Is it?"

"There's nothing to be scared of."

He seems embarrassed by the assumption as he shakes his head.

"I'm not scared."

Then, he remembers.

"_I'm going to hug you now."_

_A young man, tentative and upset, stood at a distance from his dying mentor. He speaks it like a warning like one might speak to a traumatised child. No sudden movements. No acting out of turn. _

_He takes one step. Then, he takes two._

_By the time he feels House in his arms his eyes are full of tears he'll fight; tears he'll be mocked for because House believes he isn't worthy of his tears. _

"_Are you crying?" House asks. _

_Chase feels the man tense in his arms at the barely restrained emotion he feels seeping from his 'assailant's' every pore._

_Chase just holds on._

_House doesn't hug him back…but, he doesn't push him away. _

'Scared little boy' dies away when 'angry, betrayed young man' turns on House, literally turns on him, a physical movement as he pulls himself away from the doctor.

He snarls, animalistic and resentful. House doesn't know where it comes from until he hears Chase's words.

"You told me you were dying," he says, accusingly. "You're still here."

He puts two and two together and it clicks.

"I told you I was sorry, House. You didn't care."

_I'm sorry you're dying. _

House swallows down a stomach that's rising to his chest and throat because it puts him on the spot. It puts him in his place.

He knew that all of the terrible things he's done to Chase would come back to haunt him sooner or later.

Like the wounded youth that he was back then, Chase asks "Why would you do that?"

_Why would you do that to me after everything you know of me?_

It's not the time to speak of this, nor is it the place, not in a hospital corridor where they're crammed into a corner because it's the place that Chase chose to settle.

House reaches out to touch him, wonders whether Dr Emmett is interpreting this in the way that he, himself, would. Chase's words imply something other than the truth. Perhaps House told a brain-injured, vulnerable kid that being with him was 'killing' him, that he was 'dying' because of it and, Chase, so eager to stay, apologised with such fragile desperation only to have it go unheard; ignored.

He watches as Chase reacts, as he responds.

If he could back any further into that corner he would.

"We'll talk about that later. Lets just get you home."

"So, you want me now?"

"Chase – "

"What happens the next time? Do you lock me up again? Do you have any idea what they did to me in this place?"

Abandonment issues; troubles so deep that House will have difficulty in forcing them away. They're lifelong. He should've known. He did know. He just thought the ends would justify the means.

"They did what was best for you, Chase, just like I am."

"Mr Chase," Emmett interjects, playing on the impromptu affection the patient heaped upon him when he realised there was nowhere to run. Like the cat that purrs when scared, Chase expressed a desperate need to be close to someone when he felt that the alternative might be unpleasant. "Robert –"

"_Don't_ call me Robert."

"Okay, Chase. Please. You mustn't blame House for this. You mustn't see this as him locking you away. Like he said, he wants what's best for you and so do I. He might've said some things he didn't mean out of fear, out of being overwhelmed - "

"You? You don't even know me. You don't know him, either."

Gone is the boy that hugged him, vanished into some kind of bipolar oubliette.

"Why would you ever care about me?"

"It's not my job to know you, Chase, but it is my job to understand you and care for you. I don't do this out of some warped obligation. I do it because it's what I get paid to do."

Quietly, he tells him "You're not a burden to me and you're not a burden to House."

"Right."

"We're both doctors and we both have to take into account the best course of treatment for you. Do you understand that?"

"No."

"I think you do."

In reality he doesn't want to understand. He doesn't want to acknowledge that this past two days have seen him open up to himself more than he has in the last six months put together; that the forcible restraint, for lack of a better phrase, has seen little pieces of Robert Chase seep out through the steam and the cracks, spilling out onto the pages that Wilson afforded him.

His head falls.

His eyes flicker downwards to the cracks in the floor hoping one of them will swallow him.

"House doesn't want rid of you, Chase. Don't think of it as abandonment. Think of it as you being sick and needing treatment. A chemo patient might spend a day every week receiving therapy. Would their parent be abandoning them?"

"I don't have cancer."

He looks up. There's malice in his eyes as he says "And you didn't either, did you?"

It sets the tone of defiance and resentment that House might have to learn to live with, in the very near future.

It's an adolescent period, in some ways.

Wayward.

Wilful.

Wretched, even.

House rolls his eyes as if he's tired of all of this, as if it's not affecting him the way it clearly is. He was told not to lie to Chase but withholding his own emotions is something that will only benefit him.

His voice implies ever-endurance; patience worn thin.

"Just say goodbye to the doctor, Chase. Tell him you'll see him soon."

The "fuck you" that Chase utters as he pulls his backpack over his shoulder is surprising to both of them.

He walks as soon as the doors are opened, always five paces ahead.

"Just give him time to calm down," Emmett tells House quietly. "He's just angry right now."

"Will it be like this every time I leave him here?"

The older man smiles knowingly.

With absolute honesty he says "Probably."


	65. Chapter 79

_Another little part._

_Haven't watched the latest ep but I hear they at least made our Chase likable again._

_Hugs to all that reviewed/PM'd. I shall try to ramble back at you as soon as I have the brain for it. Dying of cold at the minute and my head feels very, very strange._

* * *

He could manage thirty-days of silence if the mood so took him.

It takes tolerance, patience, consistency. It takes determination to keep up a facade of resentment when he just wants to give in, to make peace.

House insisted he look at things objectively, to 'take himself out of the equation' - but the memory of hands pushing him down in fierce determination as they fastened him into place is just too vivid.

House expects him to go back willingly,

Chase has no 'willing' in him.

"Are you going to shut me out completely?" he asked, but Chase doesn't think him worthy of an answer.

He showers. Thin body. Hip bones too defined. Skin smooth but scarred in places. He is attractive, he can see that, but his body is so damaged he is forced to lean against the tiles.

He swallows hard. He closes his eyes.

His arm aches as he tries to raise it but he has no intention of having surgery either. He'll take the pain. House can't stop him. He lives with pain, too. He's a lot of things but he won't bend to hypocrisy.

Still water runs. He embraces its warmth. This freedom, this solitude, he embraces that, too. The ocean of thought open up but the waves are tepid.

No memory can hurt him. Not if he accepts it.

He has a flashback of holding Cameron up against the tiles, knows he was not always this weak. She's smiling with her lips parted. Her hair is dark, watered down. It gives her the look of a temptress.

She leans into him.

She tells him to make the most of this as if she'll retract at any time and, whilst her words might keep him at arm's length her actions do not.

He recalls confusion. Acceptance of the same.

Her legs are wrapped around him and her mouth is pressing on the pulse point in his neck. Through the steam he can barely see her, though his eyes were never as hazy as they are now.

He can taste her skin even now, though it doesn't intoxicate now like it did then. Not like others did.

Not like Anne did.

He amends the image.

He abandons Cameron like she abandoned him, replacing her with something...more.

He imagines making love in fast-flowing rain as it batters his shoulder blades, the aching pressure of being young and aroused breaking around his body as he inhales, exhales.

His legs tremble.

He feels the adolescent need, so strong, so overpowering. It builds up to a point he cannot ignore as he places a hand against the tile, another traipsing downward.

It feels pathetic when he's imagining her hands upon him, her fingers touching his flesh, so young, so inexperienced, feels ridiculous to resort to a fantasy. Still, he lets himself fly with it, with the vision of the only woman he feels love for on any conscious level touching him physically as if no time has passed and as if nothing ever went wrong.

She always knew how to make him forget. The irony is strong, like the rising tide that pulses within him.

He doesn't feel so tense now, but he does feel the same old Catholic guilt as he always did each and every time be gave in to the need.

His motions are fragile but after so long they're enough. He feels

salt water on his hands and it isn't tears, is the product of pleasure instead of pain.

Chase, the dreamer, can't catch his breath, the remnants of a disjointed fantasy stealing the air from his lungs as the vision dances before his eyes. When he emerges he's a new man. Sated. Calmed by his own natural means.

He almost smiles. Almost, though the embarrassment prevents a full-on grin.

He looks at House.

The smile becomes a scowl but he says nothing because that precedent has been set and he is not yet ready to retreat.

He's not ready to call that truce.

House puts forth his own truce, his own sacrifice. Against his own judgment he did this because he knew that Chase needed a friend other than him, a voice other than his and a benevolent presence in these four walls.

The previous indiscretion was not malicious. House sees that, now that the clouds have listed.

Anton sits on the couch, reluctant in ways he never was before but eager to right the wrongs he did and help, somehow.

He brought pizza and a six pack of beer. Boys stuff.

Chase looks surprised with his wet hair and his thin face and his cheekbones and his bright, bright eyes.

"Anton," he says. "What are you doing here?"

House tells it like it is.

Thirty-six hours of evasion is enough call for desperate measures.

"Daddy thought you could use a friend."

* * *

Finally, there is honesty between friends. On some level.

Chase tells Anton it's all coming back finally, that every minute he is being assaulted by images he ought to remember.

"Just now in the shower," he begins before blushing and looking away. "Well, you don't want to know."

"Past lays coming back under the spray, right?"

Chase bites back a smile. There's that good, Catholic boy again, the boy who would hide beneath the guise of celibacy to save from getting hurt. Still, boys will be boys. Even the most Godly of men has sexual urges. He recalls a bishop who likened an orgasm to opening the gates of Heaven. He saw fifteen young men heaving a sigh of relief.

Anton tells him he's glad to see him, that he's thought about him a lot since 'it' happened. He tried to call a few times but never could build up the nerve.

"Am I so scary?" Chase asks as he 'samples forbidden fruit' in the form of a watered down beer.

"I just felt bad, man. I was so stupid and you got so sick -"

"There was no malice, Anton. You didn't do that on purpose."

"Yeah, but wouldn't I be a bad, bad dude if I didn't feel guilty?"

Chase feels guilty now. He doesn't know why or what for but it's there. It lingers, ghostlike, a bruise beneath the surface.

He keeps seeing black eyes, black skin paling before him. Anton's colouring intensifies the feeling that's buried.

"I did a bad thing," he says quietly, though he can't say more than that.

He keeps seeing blood. Blood on his hands, blood on his conscience. It scares him. What did he do? What happened?

Anton senses a twist, pushes it away. House warned him Chase flips like a switch these days. He turns like a feral dog, dingo, coyote.

"Let's say we don't talk about the bad things we've done, huh, Chase? What about other stuff?"

"What, like cricket? Baseball? Soccer?"

"Or how 'bout women? I got me a new girl. Her name's Star. Guess her mother was dropping acid when she was conceived. I tell you, man, some of the things she does in the sack you wouldn't believe."

Chase smiles.

"Well, I spent the night tied to a bed with a pretty woman pawing all over me," he says, trying to compete. "She kept it up all night."

He doesn't mention the psychiatric context or the face he was so sedated he couldn't even enjoy it.

He just appreciates the high-five and the genuine smile, the masculine show of camaraderie that is shown to him.

That's normal, isn't it?

The temptation to House is normal as that leather bound book sits within touching distance. House knows it contains Chase's thoughts. His feelings. His tangible anxieties. The more he subjects House to silence the more that apple appeals. Taste me, it says. He'll never know.

Read me. You can't help him if you don't know.

Still, poking around in this book seems wrong in ways that snooping in Stacey's files was not. That was sexual jealousy, immoral curiosity. This isn't that.

He pulls his hand away and listens instead.

He hears how Chase tries to fit in, to amend himself into something acceptable. He listens as he bends the truth, as he ekes out bravado like the younger brother trying to impress a cooler sibling.

House wonders what's so wrong with being himself, with being a boy with brains, mashed as they are. He recalls Thirteen calling him impossible; prettier than that which should be legal and probably smarter, too.

What's wrong with that?

He wonders what's so bad about being Chase that he feels he has to adapt. Cameron once said he was easily led; a mouldable piece of clay that House himself had shaped into an immoral shell.

It was never that.

He thinks back to the boy who would do anything to be appreciated; who wanted nothing more than to be smiled at, to be praised and loved, even.

He realises Chase has always been this way.


	66. Chapter 80

_Another little mini chapter. mostly conversation, really, but necessary conversation. There's a bit of AU here as well. I'm taking liberties with what happened when Chase found out his dad was dead but – yeah. _

_(*)_

_If my world were to end tomorrow and he was not in, what would I do?_

_If I were to awaken tomorrow alone again, where would I be? _

House asks himself all of these questions on some degree throughout the night. What if? How? Where? Why? What would be? He's not a man averse to sleep but it doesn't come naturally to him. Consciousness lingers as he contemplates the stars, as he exists in a state of insomnia that he's grown used to over the years.

The stars have no answers for him. He reads his horoscopes daily just to mock them. Today's were especially laughable

_You cannot please everyone. Beware of conflicts of interest in your social life. You now have a full social calendar! _

House pleases nobody. His social life exists solely between these walls or Wilson's and his calendar is so empty he no longer bothers to consult it. Still, it's interesting to read the world views of a fat woman with a red face commanding the attention of the reading nation; coaxing them into a false sense of security.

House's security will come only when Chase forgives him. He needs Chase to forgive him, to trust him.

It frightens House to 'need' anything or anyone at all.

He acts on a whim so that he may prove to his ailed companion that he understands even when all evidence suggests otherwise. Chase has always been a young man who understood how he worked on some level; who could draw from his moods, even, when others found him flaky and unpredictable, rancid and volatile.

He understood Chase too, eager to please, fiercely intelligent – yet longing. Longing and lonely, unfortunately nomadic.

A nice boy.

A lost boy.

"Get up," he says, as he pulls the blankets away from Chase's sleeping body. The minute the cool air hits he tenses up. It's visible. His muscles protest against the cold and he winces; winces against the harshness of the light overhead.

"God, House, what are you doing?"

"I'm taking a stand. I won't ask you again. Get up. Don't make an old cripple drag you out of bed. It's uncouth."

"House, it's…it's…"

Chase searches for his clock, the clock he cannot read without his glasses, the clock that House is holding in his hand at this very second in time.

"…three in the morning? Tick tock, tick tock. If you're not out of this bed by 3.01 there'll be trouble."

He sighs.

"You don't want to make me angry, do you?"

The one eye that Chase opens against the light turns small, a slit of skin with blue poking through. He looks sly. He looks fox-like. He looks angry but well-restrained.

He also looks thin, House notes, the muscles of his stomach and torso barely covered in skin, let alone fat.

"Look at you," he says. "No wonder you're cold. You've the body of a pre-pubescent swimmer."

God bless Chase's poor, slow brain, unable to think of a retort in this state of exhaustion; in this too-bright light and on this too-early hour.

He tries to answer back. House can see it. He can see those words fighting their way through the thick gloop of his fractured thought processes.

The effort is commendable.

"I love how you try, Chase. You're such a trier."

The older man puts his arms around the younger. His skin is warm. His shoulder, scarred and tense, is a bone of contention between the two of them but House won't push it or pull it or manipulate it at present. Instead he'll just hide it away until the time comes to re-address.

"What are we doing?" Chase asks, morbidly confused.

"Well, for one thing you're talking to me. For another, we're going out."

"Out? It's 3 in the morning."

"Yes, I think we've established that."

"Where are we going at three in the morning?"

"So many questions, Chase. Haven't you ever heard of a surprise?"

_Pack yourself a weekend bag, Chase. I have a surprise for you. _

In a second, Chase backs away. It's as if a realisation has been made, as if momentarily lowered barriers are snapped back into place.

He locks them. Deadbolts them.

House will not get in, not like this. Not again.

"You think I'm stupid?"

"Well, yes, but I assume you think I'm trying to trick you."

"You lied to me before."

"Everybody lies."

"You took me to that place after telling me we were going away for the weekend."

"That was just a little white lie but my intentions were good."

Chase snorts. It doesn't suit him.

"That's arguable."

"Yeah, well, you're in no position to argue right now. Get dressed. If you don't come willingly this old man will drag you kicking and screaming. You're a nice boy. I don't think you'd want to wake up the neighbours, now, would you?"

Playing on his niceness.

Such a cheap trick.

Chase sighs.

"No," he says quietly, forever the martyr to his own goodness.

(*)

Chase wasn't expecting this. He isn't sure what he was expecting but not this. Not here.

"This is where I found you. After your dad died, I mean."

It's an old crypt, quiet, vacant. The grass around is overgrown, laden with a haziness that would render a special-effects man to orgasm and would be a haven for any clichéd vampire that chose to walk within this place.

There are three other graves in the vicinity but none are as spectacular at this one which dates back to the founding years of this very country. The church is small but it's one that House knows Chase frequented at least when he could ably focus on his religion. On a whim he followed him here once, wondering what his handsome young apprentice did on his 'day off'. He was surprised to see Chase wearing a dark grey suit and red tie shaking hands with women and men alike, going in peace as mass ended.

Chase instinctively knows that House is telling the truth. He feels drawn to this place, his heart and his mind heavy with the truth of it.

He has a flash of himself on the small stone bench over in the corner near to the wrought-iron fence with a bottle of wine in his left hand and a bible in his right.

"I was a mess that night."

He was. Tearful and agitated, so angry he could've screamed. He did. Once. Then he just cried.

"You weren't drunk but you were thinking about it. For a minute I had you down as suicidal. I thought you might have a bottle of pills in your top pocket. Then I remembered you're not that stupid."

Chase haunts himself, the ghost of who he was walking in this dead of night and the person he now is shivering as if he's walking over his own grave.

He ponders quietly his own state of mind, the raw sadness and anger that might drive him to drink; to question God, as he understands he did that night.

"You had every right to be angry. Your old dad, he played you. He messed you around and then he died. What right did he have to do that?"

"Everybody lies. Everybody dies."

"True. But, not everyone chooses Wilson as his oncology God when he's not even close to the best in his field."

"Then, why did he?"

"Your father could've gone anywhere. He came to Princeton Plainsboro. You _know_ why."

"Because he was an idiot?"

"No. Because that's where his son was and he might've been too weak and too cowardly to make amends with the boy but he wanted to at least see him before he died."

"He could've just called."

"No. No, he couldn't."

Because it's hard to admit when you're wrong. Because it's hard to let down a boy like Rowan's boy when his eyes are so vivid and so meaningful and his expression can be so, so damning that it physically hurts.

House hurts. He pushes it away but he does.

He hurts because for more than a split second, Chase saw him as no better than his father, the one who haunts him, now, dead and unspoken, amends still hanging loose and unmade.

"You said I left you. You hate me for doing that, Chase, I know, because everybody leaves you."

House looks at him, now.

"But, I never left you. Not for one second. I never slept while you were in that place. I wanted to turn right back and get you and I did. I tried. But, you know what? You were getting better. You were showing promise. You were thinking. You were remembering. More than that, though, you were fighting."

"Because I _had_ to."

"Because you _always_ had to, didn't you? You always had to fight like the little scrapper you'd love for people to see you had to fight from the minute you were born. For love. For attention. For your father, until he left. For your mother, until she died. You played the part of the son to perfection but they never quite played the part of parents. You fought - "

"For respect – "

" – from me, yes. And, from Cameron you fought for something you wrongly thought was worthwhile when it clearly wasn't but there's a pattern there, Chase. Don't you see? You're passive-aggressive when you're not afraid but you fight when you think you're losing. You've been fighting all your life."

He speaks quietly, more to himself than anyone else.

"And they say I don't know empathy. They say I don't know a human emotion if it stares me in the face."

"You read people well," Chase says softly. Truthfully. "But, why did you bring me here? Why here? What made you think I'd want to come here?"

"Because this is where you felt safe once and you need to feel safe now. This is where you came when you felt so low you had nowhere else to go."

"And, you found me. Is that right?"

"I found you because I knew you. I came looking because you were out of your mind and I was scared you were going to do something stupid. This place, Chase, it's fine in broad daylight but at night? Well, this isn't the safest place, no matter how safe it feels. You might put all your faith in God but he's not going to step in when some guy with too much meth in his veins steps in with a knife."

"Are you trying to say you saved me?"

"No. I'm trying to say that I didn't leave you. You were out of your mind but I didn't leave you. I'd never do that. No matter what people think of me I'm not one to give up on my projects. I'd have dragged you back kicking and screaming if you hadn't come willingly and for the record you were actually glad to see me."

Chase nods his head. There's no emotion there, none that can be read.

"So, when I was more alone than I'd ever been in my life you were there, right?"

House doesn't even have to confirm the truth of the statement. He just remains quiet, contemplating that moment when he talked Chase down; when he told him his old man wasn't worth drinking for, wasn't worth crying for.

For one patient, his death was worth dying for, though.

"I killed a woman that day," Chase says, quietly. "Because of me somebody died. I know that much. I was here because of her, not because of him."

"I know that."

"She died."

"Patients die," House says, quietly, feeling a rock in his stomach and a skipped beat in his chest. "We can't save everyone."

"But, I could've saved her. If someone had cared more maybe, I could've saved her. I lied to everybody because I didn't want them to see I was weak and afraid."

His eyes are full of tears.

House didn't expect that.

"I never wanted anyone to know that I loved my father. I could've saved her if I'd been honest."

"You could've saved a lot of people. Some people hold back. Some people don't want to save themselves. She held back. You just didn't question it."

Chase smiles sadly at that.

"Maybe I should've. Maybe I should've questioned my dad too. Maybe that mess wouldn't have happened if I had."

"We can't live our lives on what ifs, Chase. What ifs don't change anything. We live and we learn. People die. It's part of the job. But, people live, too."

He thinks of that old black dictator in this moment as he says "because of you, so many people have lived."

So many people have lived even because of a man that Chase caused to die but he won't say that now. Not here.

He won't discuss that on sacred ground.

"Thank you for trying to protect me from that. For trying to make me feel better," Chase says as he finally looks House in the eye.

"Thank you for being…human."

"Oh, I'm human alright. I might have a God-complex but I'm just as mortal as anyone out there. More so, perhaps. I've made my own mistakes. I know that. I just…don't tend to acknowledge them as readily as the likes of you."

He places a hand on the stone of the crypt.

Chase just stares down at it.

"I know without looking who's buried here. I've been here so many times, even in my own head. Every time I got stressed recently this place came to mind. This place. I don't know why I'm so drawn to it. I feel calm here. I don't even know why."

"Why does anybody go to church?"

"Because the only one that gives a damn is an invisible being that lives in the sky?"

It's a plea, in a sense.

House picks up on it and, for once, he gives the boy what he needs. He tells him what he needs to hear.

"You might think I don't give a damn but I do. I'm just bad at showing it. I'm a jerk. I'm an ass. I was probably designed to be alone but the thought of losing you, the thought of doing wrong by you, it's…"

It's too much to even describe so he doesn't even try.

"Look, I want to give you what you need but you need to start trusting me to do that. I'm not going to leave you and if I do I'll always come back."

He smiles, then. He fills himself with sarcasm.

"If not you who'd cook for me? Who'd pick up my mess? You're a good servant, if nothing else. You're also a moron but it just so happens I like morons."

He can't just be nice. He's the angel with the scowl, the God with the Harley Davidson tattoo. He paints himself unpleasant because it's easier that way. The sarcasm is his shield, his armour. It just so happens he's as vulnerable as Chase is only he'd never admit it. Not to anyone.

He doesn't realise how transparent he is.

"Can we go home now?" Chase asks. "You've made your point."

"What point was that?"

"You know what point."

"I need to consolidate your learning."

"You're not going to leave me. You care about me. You'll lie to make me feel better. You'll tell the truth even if it'll hurt me if it'll help in the long run. You know more about me than I could possibly have known and…you were there when my dad died."

"I wasn't there. I showed up but I wasn't there."

"Well, same difference. I probably would've followed in my mum's footsteps and drank myself stupid if you hadn't come."

"Oh, you drank yourself stupid," House admits. "Just…not alone. And, not in a churchyard in the middle of Costa Del Streetcrime."

Now they both laugh.

"Time to go?" he says. "There's a Hammer Horror movie showing at 5. I figured we could throw a couple of shrimps on the Barbie and crack open some tinnies. Pull an all-nighter like normal people do."

"Normal people who take late night trips to cemeteries, right?"

"Preparation for the horror movie. Had to get into the spirit of things."

There's an understanding here. It's quiet. It's brief. There's an understanding on House's part that Chase will want to talk about things more and there's an understanding on Chase's part that House will allow him to do that.

But, not here.

Not now.

House stumbles as he climbs through the gap in the fence, the overgrown, weed-laden corner of the dark universe that Chase seeks solace in. He winces as he tries to gain composure, as he tries to save face.

Usually, he'd push 'help' away but the fact it comes from Chase is symbolic, in a sense.

Concern in moonlight, in darkness, in twilight.

Eyes that showed nothing at all now showing compassion.

"Are you alright?" Chase asks, as he takes House by the arm and steadies him.

He doesn't pull away. He doesn't push. He doesn't seek escape from the hands that aid and support like he would've done before. Instead, he just nods his head, no smile, no expression.

"I'm fine," he says, though it's more than that. He's more than fine.

He fell…and Chase caught him when he could've, possibly should've let him fall.

It's a reciprocation, in a sense, a sign that their universes are balanced in some ways. Double-sided. Requited.

"Lets get you home," Chase says, as he pushes House forward. "This is no country for old men."

He smiles. Barely there, but pushing through as the moon pushes through the clouds so brightly, so commandingly.


	67. Chapter 81

_It's been weeks, I know. Months, even. I doubt anyone is even still reading this here story but I felt a little spattering of inspiration this past few days so I thought I'd write a little bit down._

_I'm still hanging onto the show. I have to say I feel better about it since they dropped the Huddy. I know people have mixed views on that but I have to say I think that it was starting to stifle just about everything else that was good in it. I'm no longer a die-harder but I'm willing to see it through. I've seen inklings of what once was, i.e. Wilson/House and the Chickens and some other little elements of the old show that I had grown to love._

_I guess I was inspired by that. But – yeah, there is a bit of flirtation here, a bit of a bittersweet memory of a past love for our Chase. I guess he just feels drawn to that. _

_(*)_

Chase wonders if anybody would recognise him now that he has changed; now that he has grown up, now that he has filled out all of the empty spaces of his skin and mouldled into himself. He was small as a child, gangly tall as a young man. It was as though his personality never quite matched his body and was always fighting to catch up, to grow in.

His face never changed, though.

_i"You've a very distinctive face, Robert," Anne used to tell him as she ran her finger along his prominent jaw, as she stretched across to those full, pink lips that she'd kiss so deeply and so enviously._

_"I'm a standout guy. Really unique. Look at these eyes. You ever see eyes this colour? My mother tells me they're the prettiest eyes she ever saw."_

_In reality it was his grandmother who said those words, his own mother barely making eye contact at all, past the age of seven. He'd play along. He'd pretend, for all the world, that he understood his own beauty even when he didn't._

_"So full of yourself," Anne would tease. "It's sickening."_

_He'd big it up just to make her laugh because her laugh was like music, a great cliché, perhaps, but a truth to him. He hadn't heard enough laughter in his time, craved it like an addict craves that sweet taste of cocaine against his lips and gums and tongue and teeth._

_Robert craved happiness; acceptance. She gave it to him until she no longer could._

_She'd breathe against him, her lips close to his neck, and she'd wrap her arms around him with a possessiveness that made him warm where he'd always felt cold before. Chase needed to be needed; wanted to be wanted. Not many people know that of him but she did. She always did. She saw through his independence and she nurtured that part of him; that little boy that was never given in to._

_It's the ego of the man that needs to be fed, that primitive Order that falls so firmly into place._

_"You'll forget me after awhile," he'd tell her, fishing for compliments, itching to be gathered back in and always, always, she'd give him what he needed. "When you move to Italy, you'll meet some Italian bloke and I'll be nothing but a blond, blue eyed mistake."_

_She'd always kiss him harder when he said these things, manipulated at worst but so in love with him at best._

_"If you were to get lost for years and years I'd always remember your face. I'd always pick you out in a crowd, Robert. I'd always bring you home. I renounce all Italian Stallians who'd pale in comparison to my ridiculously charming Aussie who, shockingly, can't even light a barbecue."/i_

_I'll never forget you, she said, no matter what._

_Chase wonders if the words of a young-adult woman would still ring true now; now that his eyes are haunted, now that the distinctive jaw is peppered with blond stubble, that 'pretty' face wrought with lost-experience._

_iI'd never forget you, Robert./i_

He wonders if he'd pick iher/i out of a crowd after all these years. Would she still remember? Would she still bring him home? His skin is paler than it once was through diminished hours of sunlight, a cautious young man that attempts to hide in shadows because it's easier than walking in them.

Shadows of himself.

Shadows of the man he left behind.

Chase feels as if he's been kept inside for awhile, for a ilong while/i, that he'll be 'inside' until the sun begins to shine again, until the light begins to tan his skin and make him whole. They say that monks can live in solitude for years at a time without adverse effect, that their bond with the spiritual is so intense that even isolation cannot break it. On the other side of that idealistic coin, they say that after isolation a monk might find himself pained by lack of interaction, by the fear that holds him back and leaves him wanting.

A human being regresses when they're kept in the dark. They need to build up their petals and spread out toward the sun once they break free.

Chase wants to break free but he's not ready. Not yet.

Chase wants to embrace everything that's good and bad in his world rather than cocooning himself in that which makes no sense.

He also wants, ineeds/i, isolation and so he is torn.

"You want to fly but you want to hide. You want to run but you're frozen still. Make your mind up, pretty boy, because you're starting to give me a pounding headache."

"Just leave me," he told House. "Just for today. Go to work and forget about me. I'll figure out what I want. I just need the time alone. Please, Greg."

Greg, now?

"You want me to leave you?"

"I ineed/i you to leave me."

House had seen in his eyes that he meant it, that he wanted to retreat so that he could grow, move back so he could move forward. He understood in a sense, understood the need for two steps back before progress could be made.

Like an overwhelmed animal, Chase needs to regroup. To recharge.

"I won't go out. I won't run away. You can lock me in if it'll make you feel better. I just…I need this."

He just needed time. Space.

He just needed a place to spread his wings with nobody watching, nobody judging.

House had accepted.

House had given in and Chase loved him for that.

"If you need anything," House had told him, "just call Wilson. Or consult your friend. God knows she cost enough and you've barely touched her. She can do anything you ask her to. She can even cook for you."

In a sense…

House had closed the door leaving Chase alone, a 'youth' trusted for the first time in his parents' absence. There are notes on that whiteboard in the kitchen, little prompts designed to keep his life in order but for the most part Chase is the master of his own universe and, like He-Man, he has The Power.

His 'friend', as House refers to 'her', sits silently in the corner. It's expensive and well-made, attractive to look, neat, accessorised. House spared no expense and, the truth be told, this 'friend' is the most intelligent creation Chase has ever encountered . Its knowledge knows no limits. Spanish. Japanese. History. Science. The 'friend' could tell him anything, could show him anything, could show him the world without him needing to leave the comfort of that safe place.

Whatever he needs his 'friend' will provide, endlessly devoted, reliable to the point of beauty.

Chase, he turns on his friend with his fingers alone.

'She' does all of the work for him.

He feels a stab of excitement as she springs to life, her organs whirring inside of her, her body trembling to wakefulness. Her 'skin' is smooth and, as he touches her buttons she begins to 'moan', her 'breathing' heavy, her eyes lighting up bright blue for a second and then onto black.

The flash screen is vast and deep, man's connection to the world. Without it he is cut off. Secluded. The computer is the world, now, the universe, a myriad of corners Chase would not tread, could not tread at this point in his life. Inside that small rectangular 'box' is Pandora, his very own box of tricks that he could unleash upon the world if his 'friend' took him to the right places.

"You've done this before," House had reminded him, though Chase barely remembers those tiny ventures into his online-life, those little baby steps into the person he doesn't remember being. He's seen his wish-list on Amazon and wondered why on earth he'd ever need the items listed thereon. He'd scoured his e-mails and tried to make sense of the rambling information they contained.

Now, he wanted to connect.

He wanted to reach out and embrace the man he once was whilst embracing the people who made him that man.

"Odds are your password is actually password," House had told him. "I'd tell you I hadn't checked but I'd be lying. 322 friends, Robbie. I have to question whether you actually know any of them."

It always struck House as sad that Chase never used anything meaningful, never had anything meaningful, but the boy was always predictable, always straight-forward in some elements of his life.

The fact that House's own password is 'Einstein' speaks only of his delusion of grandeur.

Chase sits down at the computer and bravely searches for old friends, those who went before, those who left their mark on his life; their impression on his very being.

His fingers hover over the left side of the keyboard.

She was always going to come first.

He finds Anne, beautiful Anne with her beautiful children and her marriage in tatters, her wonderful husband not quite as wonderful as he once was and her life not quite so perfect. 'Single,' her profile states, 'but not hopeless.'Chase feels a pang, feels it only yesterday that they parted ways, feels it only recent that they fell apart too.

Her profile picture is of her smiling face, older than it was but no less magnetic. Her eyes are still large and vivid, her smile still the very epicentre of beauty.

Chase thinks that time has aged her in ways it has not touched him – but, the experience has made her more beautiful than ever.

He smiles when he reads through her 'likes' (80s music, 'Pretty in Pink'), sees part of himself when he sees the word 'surfing'. He smiles, smiles more brightly when he notes that she travelled to Australia only a year before and 'found herself' as she walked into the Sydney waves. For a brief moment, Chase wonders if she was looking for him; whether she was hoping to find a little piece of her past just like he is.

He can't venture worldwide to find his. He's not well enough.

This, however, is a start.

His heart aches when he moves to close the page. He feels like he's shutting the door once again. He dares not send evidence of his own existence, an extended hand over a white screen.

He doesn't know what he'd say.

Still, his finger hovers over a request for friendship, the chance of a link re-established and it's with a great sense of daring that he clicks that button, making himself vulnerable once more.

He doesn't expect an immediate response, doesn't expect that small box in the bottom right corner to flash up so unexpectedly as it does.

'I always knew we'd meet again', she says, a virtual voice on the horizon of his own bravery. 'Never thought we'd be surfing the web together, Rob. It was always meant to be the waves.'

He tries to find the words to reply but his mind is blank and his tongue is dry and he's swallowed by it all.

He adjusts his glasses.

Then, he begins to type.

'You wouldn't believe how much I miss you,' he types. 'It feels like only yesterday.'

'It's been a lifetime.'

'Not for me it hasn't,' he types, his fingers trembling, his heart beating right up into his throat.

He's not lying.

He only wishes she knew that.

(*)


	68. Chapter 82

_Another little Chapter. Guess I'm 'on a roll' so to speak._

_Don't worry, I'm not going to go all 'gooey het romance' on you. I just wanted Chase to feel this connected to someone other than House. A healthy connection for him, even if its only an online one._

_This little figment of his past might help him, aw. Might make him smile._

(*)

_AnnieMac- So, did you live your dream? Did you travel the world in a Yewt with a handmade engine and a mongrel dog in the back?_

_RobertC- Unfortune not. I had to be practical. Rabies, you know?_

_AnnieW- Pet passport? I thought you had it all planned out? You were all for growing veggies on the roof rack to be self sufficient. My little green warrior._

_RobertC- It only would've been fun if I had someone with me. Those were our dreams, Anne, not just my._

He doesn't notice how he gets his words wrong, doesn't care. Unfortune. My, not mine. It's not important now. Only the sentiments are.

There is silence spread out for awhile, a long white nothingness that leaves Chase wondering if he said the wrong thing. He waits for the fallout; for the tirade of painful truths about how he was the one that put a stop to it, that only he is to blame for how it all went down.

Instead, she is philosophical towards what she remembers being a potentially brilliant man. If she notices his grammatical errors, indeed, she is tactful. She knows nothing of his accident, nothing of his loss.

She knows nothing of him living with another man for survival and more, assumes the 'bachelor pad' thing is normal for doctors who are so well-into their careers. She calls House Chase's 'roomie' and asks if he can wash a dish better than he can.

Then, she just speaks of their past fondly.

_AnnieW- Rob, our dream was daft. I would've got car sick anyway. Plus, I get grouchy when I don't get to watch my soaps. You always knew that. That was always the risk. _

He smiles now, caught up on a memory of 'Corrie Night' and the great love affair with the East End Market that graced their small screen on too regular an occasion.

_RobertC- Emmerdale Farm. How we ate that shite up. How many hours of our life did we lose? _

_AnnieW – An embarrassing number of hours. _

He loved her because she was a Secret Nerd, just like he was. She laughed at what he laughed at, cried while he tried not to.

They were good together.

_AnnieW- Those were the days, Rob, before all of this._

She doesn't specify what 'this' is. Chase doesn't ask. He doesn't want to pry. He doesn't want to pry into the disasters of her life unless she wants to reveal them.

He never wanted to make her uncomfortable, even if he did.

She asks what he's done with his life, compliments him on his profile picture, taken by Thirteen at a wedding reception they both resented with a passion. He looks fresh on it, clean cut, boyishly handsome.

_AnnieW - You still look twelve years old. Is a doctor's life so stress free?_

Chase has a flickering memory of that picture, of a night spent pondering life and love and where it all went wrong, all the while trying to keep a straight face whilst the sixty year old groom pawed his thirty-years-younger bride.

He answers the question about his life with perfect honesty.

_RobertC- I don't know what I've done with my life. A lot of it is a blur. _

No kidding.

_AnnieW- I know the feeling._

_RobertC – For a mother of two you look pretty good, though. _

There is a pause. A stop.

He blinks hard. Did she not want to hear that?

Then:

_AnnieW- I never did forget you, Rob. I still have that old picture of us together in Paris. You look dog-sick from the lobster bisque but it's one of my favourite memories. I had to hold a cloth to your head, you were so dramatic._

There's nobody here to hear him laugh out loud, nobody around to see the look of genuine amusement in his eyes.

_RobertC- You loved mothering me._

Cameron didn't. She loved him in an entirely different way. He might not remember where he celebrated his one-year anniversary with Cameron but that Eurostar trip to France a decade or longer ago is etched in his mind as if burned there. He can still smell the scent of her perfume; can still feel the gentleness of her hand on the back of his neck as he hugged the toilet bowl tight and possessively.

He grins. Laughs, even, at the mere thought of it.

_RobertC- Anyway, I told you we should've settled for McDonalds. That pompy posh place smelled funny. Like talc._

The smiley face is so gratefully received.

_AnnieW- And, to think we all assumed you were a snob._

(*)

She leaves when she must to pick up the children from school, five hours ahead in time, years ahead in emotional maturity and development.

_AnnieW- So wonderful to talk. Even if it is with our hands and at a distance of thousands of miles._

_RobertC- Good to talk, Anne. I don't get to talk much any more. _

_AnnieW- You? I don't believe that for a minute. _

There's so much she wouldn't believe, like how he only learned to feed himself with any degree of certainty recently; how he still wakes up with his heart in his mouth because he doesn't remember where he is or how he got there.

Don't be a stranger, she says, though he's a stranger to himself.

He's sad to see her leave, to see her name disappearing from his screen, along with her face. Before she goes she sends him a link, a picture in a screen, a stark, vivid piece of himself sent out from across the globe.

The image is entitled 'good times' and there he is, peaky and unwell trying hard to hold the smile in place whilst his stomach rebelled against him. He's wearing a Paris St Germain football shirt and his hair, it's blond and full. She stands beside him, so small yet so strong in a lemon dress with her sunglasses holding her hair back.

_AnnieW- A parting gift. I'll talk to you later xxx_

It's more than a gift, more than she could ever imagine and, as he stares at it with eyes that don't work as well as they once did, he can't even fathom the feeling any more. She loves him so much, _loved_ him so much. He can see that. He can still feel it.

Look at how close she holds him, how he wishes someone would do that now. How he wishes someone would gather him up the way that she did when he needed it, when he wanted it. He can see how much she wanted it.

So many dreams he had back then. He can see those too.

How he wishes he could turn back time, return to that one, shining place in that one, shining moment.

He can't, though.

There is no turning back, only moving forward.


	69. Chapter 83

_Further tiny fragment of this here story for those who are still around. Only tiny, like I said. Just a little snippet that came to me on my lonesome…_

Hello to all those who have just 'joined me' - and I hope that I shall not disappoint. You're right. I do lack confidence. It's just a trait that I'll probably never get rid of. This 'fandom' is so fickle as well. People come and go. People are there and then they are gone. Things are good...and then they are not good any more.

I guess my insecurity is something I'll have to learn to live with, but again, I hope you are well and good. I'm always open for feedback and ideas so feel free to drop me a line.

_(*)_

_This time it will be better. This time, the 'son' trusts the 'father'._

They visit Monster Trucks, marvel at how those larged-wheeled beasts pummel each other into submission whilst wondering whether or not there's a sense of displaced aggression in those who wish to watch such a spectacle.

"What do you think?" House asks. "Takes skill, doesn't it?"

"To crash a car? Sure it does."

"As much skill as surgery, Chase. Think about it."

"I am thinking about it. All I see is a years-old fairground ride in grand scale. We called it the dodgems. I was pretty good at it."

"You were pretty good at everything. What were you? Superchild?"

Chase smiles.

"I spent a lot of time at the fairground. My grandma used to take me. I used to spend my pocket money on fortune tellers and candy floss. The dodgems were a whole lot riskier than this for a little kid."

House looks offended, put out that his favourite 'sport' can be reduced to such mindless sarcasm.

"_This_, this is quality entertainment. What would a man with half a brain know about that?"

He steals a tortilla out of a cardboard tray that Chase hasn't touched, mindful of that very fact. He doesn't make a point, chooses his battles as strategically as the truck driver chooses which part of his opponent's car to trash.

He understands the reason Chase hasn't eaten a single thing, that the fact he'll be 'going away' again is playing heavily on his mind.

He doesn't push.

"I suppose cricket takes more skill?"

"As a matter of fact it does. It's all about angles and weighted throws."

"Throwing a ball isn't exactly rocket science, Chase."

"Neither is crashing a car."

The crunching sound of tyres on metal is as distracting as the sound of corn on teeth as House demolishes the chip.

The noise bothers Chase, though he says nothing.

He's learning to inhibit himself even if, at times, his mouth runs away with him.

"These men risk their lives for our entertainment, Chase. We risk our own lives watching idiots in knitted sweaters throw a ball. It's entirely possible a person might fall into a vegetative state and never recover, it's that dull."

"I never did."

The words earn a laugh as House reminds Chase he spends a good portion of his life in some kind of cataplexy.

"You do that to me," the younger man argues as he pulls his hands up into his sleeves and tries to suppress a self-satisfied smirk. "A guy's night out to me used to consist of beer and football. The only car crashes were the ones when the barmen were too idiotic to take the keys off their paying customers."

"Number one, you can't drink like you used to. Number two, it's not football, it's soccer. And number three? This is art."

"Art. Okay. Just like fingerpainting gives Salvador Dali a run for his money."

House rolls his eyes at the mock contempt in Chase's voice, nudges him ever so slightly simply because he can.

"Admit it, House. This is just big boy's toys on the biggest scale imaginable. There's a reason why they look like remote control cars."

"Oh, hush."

House edges to the end of his seat like an excitable child when the red car edges into, and over, the blue one. Fingers in his mouth, it's the look of extreme stress, nails bitten down to the quick over something as juvenile as this.

Chase just enjoys watching him. The cars, he can do without. It's the sense of camaraderie; the illusion of friendship that is turning out to be not such an illusion after all.

There are no pretences here.

There are no hidden meanings, just two men who happen to live together enjoying a night of 'excitement' with snacks, drinks and energy. He'll enjoy it while he can, knows that tomorrow he'll be away again, respite for House, change for him. He knows that the old man therapist with the serious face and the soft, gentle smile will coax out of him his weekly events with such calm understanding that he'll feel compelled to open up.

He can almost picture his own face smiling like the giddy, lovestruck teenager he feels himself to be as he gushes about a connection re-established through the wonders of the world wide web. He imagines Dr Emmett will frown behind those wire-rimmed glasses, will rub the side of his nose as he clears his throat and asks Chase if he's perhaps putting too much 'emphasis' on a few shared messages from thousands of miles between.

He knows House would do the same, if he were to tell him of his correspondence…

"It's important that you focus on yourself," is what Emmett will tell him, and he'll smile and nod his head and agree with everything the old man tells him just to be 'safe'; just to be non-threatening. Then he'll retire to his room with a book and a pair of thick-lensed glasses quieter than before, calmer than before - happier, even, for Dr Emmett's grandfatherly gestures and deep-rooted desire to 'help'.

He won't resent it, not this time, and they won't have to saddle him with the same sense of helplessness as before. Lightning won't strike him down again, especially now he knows that House will return for him.

He 'trusts', somewhat. Besides, he told Anne he'd be back, doesn't want to let her down, doesn't want to let _himself _down.

The thought tires him. House doesn't take offence when Chase sinks down into his seat; when his eyes begin to close despite the high-excitement. It's the lull of the engines that sends him down into sudden unconsciousness; the hum and the comfort of a jovial jaunt that 'relaxes' him to the point of shutdown.

House doesn't nudge him, nor does he raise his voice. He doesn't mock him like he would Wilson or jam him in the thigh with a pain as he once did with Taub after a long night of adultery left him snoozing in the office one Saturday morning .

He just assumes the poor, brain-damaged kid is tired or, worse, ungrateful.

"Waste," he says under his breath, not quite meaning it. Not since Chase's narcoleptic qualities have simply been labelled another 'effect' of the ceiling that crashed and fell upon him.

At least he wakes up.

"Talk about taking the saying 'sleeping on a clothesline' to heart."

He reaches over and he takes the untouched cup of soda from Chase's hands, removes that paper tray of chips from his lap and, as not-quite an afterthought, pulls his coat up tighter around him because the chill is picking up now that the sun has gone down and the lights in this place give off no heat whatsoever.

It's not that he cares, is what he tells himself, what he'd tell the world if they dared witness this gesture of kind from a middle-aged man to what appears to be his pale and fragile offspring. It's not that he's worried about Chase's thin body feeling the cold of the 9pm air. He just doesn't want to suffer the consequence of a sudden bout of pneumonia, the wracking cough of a suffering young man cutting into his well earned, much-needed beauty sleep.

"Just like babysitting," he mutters as he sombrely stuffs his face with food that isn't his yet he paid for.

He turns back to the 'action' as these wrestling, wielding machines plough into each other with such force it's almost hard to imagine but it doesn't seem to shine as brightly as before.

"See what you did? You ruined it."

Right about now they're just cars. They're not a bonding tool, nor are they a talking point. They're not an emotional stimulant, as House hoped they would be for Chase and as they were for some time. They got the 'patient' expressing opinions; stimulating parts of his brain that puzzles and fractions are no good for.

No. Now, they're just vehicles. They're just pieces of metal soon to be scrapped and drivers who should know better.

Without Chase's good-natured condemnation it doesn't seem quite so exciting, so invigorating after all.

(*)


	70. Chapter 84

_Well it's been awhile. A LONG while. I don't even know if people are still here. The fandom has died a death. But I felt like writing, felt like picking up and so I've written a short "Internal Chase" chapter._

_I warn you now, it's shite. Just needed to write something. _

_Chase learns trust._

_But he's still blind._

_xxxx_

At 4am, Chase realises that he's becoming something he vowed he'd never be.

_Sentimental. _

He uses the word loosely, a warped sense of the adjective because how can one be sentimental with little knowledge of the sentiments attached to words, pictures and thoughts? Yet here he is, achingly tired, hopelessly switched on and smiling serenely at something which went before.

He's thinking about the ocean, of himself high up on that board manning the waves, riding nature as if he owned it. He's nodding gently at the memory, a good memory, a pure memory.

People are at the sides, on the shore. They're screaming his name over and over. They're calling him Bobby C. He doesn't mind.

A man with a foghorn, he shouts his name, commentating his every move from the comfort of his own tower.

Chase shivers, though he's warm.

That was him.

Is it sentimental? After all, he was King of his own universe out there on his day. What is he now but the Prince of House's, former jester of Princeton Plainsboro?

Does that make him defeated?

* * *

They won't leave him, the thoughts, niggling at his addled brain with a mixture of melancholy, infinite sadness and absolute hope.

He struggles with which emotion he most feels before accepting them both. Both are relevant. Both are meaningful.

Both are important in the grand scheme of the balanced psyche and isn't that what he's trying to acquire?

5am and he can't stop thinking about the surf, that feeling of sometimes warm, sometimes cold water washing over him, the taste of salt on his lips and the tactile sensation of breeze and wind on his skin, in his hair. He wonders if it's the sound of the dryer, that tumbling noise of water against water, rhythmic like the waves. Waves are life. There in the surf, that's as close to God as he's ever been.

He laughs to himself, remembers the time he fell face first into his board, chipped a tooth and ruined his perfect smile. His old man wasn't best pleased at a trip to the dentist for cosmetic treatment to beautify his wayward son. The bastard had been more interested in posed family photographs than the blood that marked Robert's bottom lip.

He smiles to himself, remembers the time he rode THAT 'tsunami'.

That was life. Back then, he was perfect even if his life wasn't.

"Remember when he won the club championship at sixteen?"

He took home a trophy that nobody placed on the mantel and gushed at with pride.

"Do you remember that?"

He asks himself the question as if speaking to another.

Sometimes he thinks that's the truth, that he's conversing with an inner voice that isn't even his.

He was proud, back then, proud of his accomplishment in beating fourteen budding champions on their own turf. Defiantly, he kept that win to himself without sharing for who else was important at that time but Robert Chase?

Those were the days. Those were the days of depending on nobody, caring about no-one and everyone at once.

He misses them.

He misses the solitude; the independence as well as the loneliness.

Does that make him strange?

* * *

6am and he's still thinking. His therapist would call this obsessive compulsive; invasive thoughts he cannot regulate or put into focus.

Chase just calls it being human.

He remembers the burn of the sun on the back of his neck, turning his nape flaxen. How golden he was. Will he ever be golden again or has the shine been lost?

He wonders.

Chase used to mock people like this, those that lay in bed awake at night fighting sleep as they stared at cracked and broken ceilings as if they could force their way into the clouds by just looking hard enough.

He used to laugh at those who dreamed up old times, old thoughts.

"Remember this?" "Remember that?"

What, indeed, was the point?

The look on their face would be so distant and so perfect and so longing that it almost didn't look like their look at all. Euphoric. Dreamlike. When Chase wears that 'look' they tell him he's dissociative, that he's zoning out into an altered state to protect himself from the world. It's not good, they way. It's not healthy. Perhaps that's what they were doing, taking them back to better times because they were no longer perfect and nor was life.

Who was he to judge them?

"_We were so young back then. God, what I'd give to still have those legs." _

"_I was amazing on horseback." _

He wondered why people tortured themselves with memories of a more perfect 'them' with a youthful body and a free spirited earthiness that only got dimmed with age. When the wrinkles lined their face and the stoop of middle age became more pronounced they'd proudly exclaim how strong beautiful they once were. Perhaps it was because his own good memories were so few and far between. Perhaps he envied them.

Past tense.

Envied.

Now, he's just like them.

Was Chase beautiful once? Was he beautiful in his youth when he strong-armed God's Bathtub with a board and a rope attached to his ankle, its tiny thread the only thing separating him from the sea?

Is that what keeps him holding on now, a tiny thread? He needed it then. Accepted it then. Does he need it now? Should he accept it?

Perhaps it's House that keeps him upright. Perhaps the world is an ocean and the only thing keeping him grounded is the man.

The thread.

Does that make him necessary?

* * *

He never used to be this way.

He remembers his grandmother singing a song, over and over. "One day at a time, Sweet Jesus," and that's how he always said he'd take it. One day at a time. No point in looking back. No need to cover things that have gone before. "Move on with your life," she'd say. "What's done is done."

Don't look back in anger. Don't look back at all.

That was then. He followed it then. Lived it. Needed it, in order to move forward.

That was then and this is different, so different. That was then and now all he has are old photographs to remind him of the callow youth he once was, as well as the idealistic young man that people expected him to be. It's not damaging. It's not reminiscent, nor is it indulgent.

_It's_ _necessary._

In order to grow, to move on, Chase feels he has to remember. To embrace.

To reminisce; to _know_ himself.

He tries to think of how he felt at eighteen, the turning of the man, the mark of adulthood written in black letters on his birth certificate. Does he feel the same now?

Is he who he was then?

He remembers holding Anne's hand just before they parted, whispering tearfully that he didn't know which way to turn to be a better man than his father; a better human being than his mother.

She spoke sense then. Does she speak it now?

"Oh, Robert. You'll be who you're meant to be regardless of the path you take. No matter what happens, you'll always be yourself."

He wonders if the very core of his being changed the minute the sky fell down on him. He didn't see Heaven when he penetrated the plaster and mortar but some kind of deep, enveloping abyss, yet now? Strangely, now he feels hope he's never felt before and it tempers and diffuses the terror that threatens him at every waking moment; at every niggling second when he remembers that he doesn't know himself at all.

But, he knows House. And House knows him in ways he cannot even begin to fathom or comprehend.

Why's he always thought of that as a frightening thing, to be known? To be cared for?

Does that make him weak?

* * *

At 7am, he asks himself why he pushes, why he's so afraid. The ocean never terrified him, though she knew him better than any. She is vast and dangerous, deep and enigmatic, yet she did not scare him.

So, why does a simple man?

Is it because he's beginning to love him as he once loved the ocean, need him as much as he needed her?

Some might call it a defence mechanism, possibly even an attachment disorder that leads him to be scared to death by the simple fact of love, platonic or otherwise. He challenges House because he wants him to stay. He pushes him because he can't bear for him to leave.

It's easier this way. Or, it was.

He wants to embrace him now. He wants to need him. He wants to let him be the tie that binds him.

Does it make him pitiful? Or, again, simply human?

* * *

At 8am he flags at breakfast, his head lagging in his hands, his eyes drooping ever so slightly as he struggles to combat sleep.

It never came for him last night.

"What were you doing?" House asks. "I didn't hear the TV. I thought Spongebob was pulling an all-nighter on the Cartoon channel?"

"I was thinking. I was getting to know myself."

House raises his eyebrow and asks "Is that what they're calling it these days? Is your eyesight not bad enough already?"

"I wasn't tossing off."

"Who said anything about masturbation? Is that your guilt speaking out loudly? Chase. I thought you were learning to moderate?"

He senses Chase's mood, it seems, because he makes jokes in that soft tone he reserves when he feels that eggshells are required, when he imagines that Chase is about to open up.

"I just want to know."

"Look, Robbie, you know yourself. You know yourself perfectly well. On some level."

"Do I?"

"The core doesn't change. The _soul_ doesn't change because the little baby Jesus _gave _that to you and it'd be rude to replace it just because a lump of concrete damaged your cerebral function. That idiot trailing behind me like a kitten that's lost its way? That's you. That'll always be you. The one that screams and kicks when someone's trying to actually do him a favour? That's you too. It's just expressing itself differently these days. You were _always _an antagonistic, faux independent twerp."

"You believe that?" he asks. "Do you really believe that? About the soul?"

"No. But, I know that YOU would if you remembered that you did. You were all about the spiritual when you felt you could get something out of it. Put a hot nun in front of you and all of a sudden you're reciting the scriptures."

It's not wrong.

"You're no different. Just…a little bit more eccentric."

He's being nice. Comforting. Chase knows, now, that House will backtrack on a nicety; that he'll offer forth something calming and encouraging and beguilingly helpful only to take it back when questioned upon it because it's not in his nature to be kind.

It doesn't make his words, however sporadic, less effective.

House stares into his eyes for a moment too long. For a second, Chase sees a flicker of concern before it's hidden again behind the vivid blue, not ice, not the centre of a flame but somewhere in between, this morning.

"Did you sleep at all?"

"No. I told you, I was thinking."

"All night?"

"House…"

He pulls away, angry at the accusatory stare.

"You think this is good for you?"

"It was one night. And I slept at the event."

He knows that REM sleep helps brain function and cell repair and he's reminded time and time again how important it is for him to rest but he slept for two hours in the cold of the evening whilst House kept the chill away from him. He'd argued it was a purely professional move on his part, that as a doctor he could not place a patient with poor lung function at risk of pneumonia.

That's not true at all.

Chase has little faith in his value to House but he knows that much.

Does that make him gullible?

He doesn't even know.

"I don't want a lecture, House."

House pushes him gently, though.

"Who said anything about a lecture? I wouldn't waste my voice OR my time. It's not like you listen."

A beat. A pause.

"Look, go back to bed. Get some sleep or I'll pull the daddy routine and make you take some of Emmett's pills. You don't want that, do you?"

"No."

"I'll wake you when the basketball starts. If you're good I might even order pizza."

Chase hates basketball.

He'll pick at a pizza until it barely exists at all.

Still, he smiles at House's thoughtfulness and at least looks to do what he says.

Does that make him a pushover?

* * *

He's on the couch. Chase can hear him laughing at some old foreign show on television. He picks out a few words and relates them back to High School French, amazed that he remembers it at all.

Bonjour, je m'appelle Robert. J'ai quinze ans.

It's all there, accessible if the moment is right.

He feels a seize in his legs as he pulls himself upright. He's slacked off on the physical therapy and he knows that's going to do him badly in the long run but at this moment in time that doesn't matter to him.

Pain doesn't matter to him. Pain just reminds him he's alive to feel it.

He's alive and he just needs to _tell_ someone. He wants to tell someone who always believed he'd make the right choices, even if he didn't.

He logs onto his computer, hoping above all things that she won't reject him; that the person who knew him before he was even himself will not turn him away.

He opens up a document and he begins to type, slowly at first, gaining confidence as the words spill out.

_This_ is therapy.

_This_ is catharsis.

Even at his most fragmented and at his most bleak, she always understood.

"Dear Anne," he writes. "I wasn't entirely honest with you when I told you how my life was going."

He writes more. He writes everything.

He needs her to know. He needs her to tell him it's alright because didn't she always?

He writes everything his therapist wants him to write, needs him to write, says all of the things that he needs to say to a girl he always felt comfortable enough to say them to.

"I don't know what I want. I don't know what I've done. I don't know who I've loved and who I've hurt. Anne, I'm scared."

It doesn't occur to him that she might not need to hear these things.

"I was scared then too. That's why I couldn't be with you. Because I was scared of fucking it up. I'm sorry."

He's never been so open.

He's never been so…fearless.

Perhaps it's a start.

He sleeps well after that. He closes his eyes and it's as if a knife has been removed from his heart, a scalpel pulled clean from his ventricle only he doesn't bleed. He doesn't bleed as he might had he uttered these words to a stranger. He doesn't hurt as he might if he'd been forced to share them with someone who doesn't love him at all.

The old Chase, the Chase in that picture and the girl that loved him, they stem the flow.

They turn the tide.

Does that make him deluded?

* * *

After resting, he holds out his hand. It's shaky, low blood sugar playing havoc with his ability to maintain muscle control, but it's there. Strong. Brave.

Most of all, it's accepting.

House stares down at the outstretched hand as if it were inhuman, an appendage on a creature that does not belong of this earth, let alone of this kitchen, before grabbing the wrist. Chase startles, but holds firm.

"What's this?" House asks. "An arm wrestle is your idea of fun? Might I remind you you're weak as a kitten in that area? Your fine motor skills aren't what they used to be, young Chase."

"It's a truce."

"A truce?"

"I won't fight you any more. I won't push. I won't flake out. I'll trust you to do what's right for me."

"We've been here before, Chase. Your inner sentinels always win out in the end."

Chase repeats it, furthering the point.

"I'll trust you."

He stumbles on the word. That's how difficult this is for him.

"You'll trust me?"

The shake in Chase's hands extends to his voice. He's trembling, fighting hard to maintain composure.

This is big for him.

This is bigger than anything he's ever done.

"I know you want what's best for me and…I won't question that. I know you won't leave me. I know you'll support me. I know you care about me, even if you don't show it."

"Should I call for a serenade? Seventy six bloody trombones?"

"House…"

"I'm kidding. God, so _sensitive _when you first wake up."

So sensitive full stop.

The fact is, Robert Chase doesn't trust easily and House is not worthy of trust, yet something in Chase tells him, after that trip to the cemetery, that there's more trust here than there ever was with his father, with his mother, perhaps even with his grandmother, who coddled him and loved him and protected him from as many truths as she could.

Chase needs truth. His damaged brain cannot comprehend lies any more.

House, if nothing else, is blunt. Is brutal.

"I'll go wherever you want me to go, I'll do whatever you want me to do. But don't let me rot there."

"I promise to pick you up before you're old and worn and sallow and wrinkled."

That's something, at least.

That's progress.

As if sensing a sentimental moment, House abruptly changes the subject but it's not without an enigmatic smile.

"By the way, there's a message on your voicemail. I thought it was one of the Minogue sisters but I'm pretty sure they're both way out of your league. Dani, maybe you could bang her, but Kylie?"

Chase looks confused.

"Don't look so worried, genius. You left your number on the signature at the bottom of your email. I had all your calls diverted to the house phone just in case something important came through. Would it be fair to say she's 'stoked' to hear from you?"

Stoked.

"Maybe she's rapt. She might've mentioned a Barbie and a shrimp as well."

The language of home. The words of lands afar that Chase both misses and doesn't miss at all.

"She said something about an email?"

"Right. Yeah."

"No bets for who's going to be shutting off YOUR internet access when you're meant to be sleeping."

He blushes hard.

It becomes him.

"She sounded emotional. You didn't propose, did you? Because need I remind you how badly it went with Camcam?"

_Anne. _

_God, Anne. _

"Just…be careful," House says, suddenly stern, suddenly paternal. "I don't want you having a nervous breakdown when your long lost love realises she can't have a long distance relationship with a brain damaged idiot with language delay and ambivalent attachment."

"I don't want her. I need, I just…"

"You just what? You just want to talk?"

"I want to know myself better. And maybe she can help me."

Perhaps House is hurt by that.

He doesn't show it.

"Like I said, loverboy. Be careful. I might be forced to break my promise if I come home to you crying into your Cheerios because Russell Crowe seemed like the better option."

The truth is, House doesn't want Chase hurt. He grappled with the idea of telling him that the message had been left; that the words had been recorded in plain Aussie for the benefit of reaching him because he doesn't think Chase is mentally capable of handling rejection or broken ties. He doesn't think he can handle this girl, this girl of his past and his dreams having moved so far and wide that he doesn't even recognise her any more.

It's time to let go, though.

It's time to release the restraints and let him fall or fly.

"Just don't expect me to pick up the pieces when you realise she's not what you remember."

"I won't."

Chase smiles. He trusts that, despites House's words, he will. He would pick up _any_ pieces.

He's never had that trust in anyone before. Not since Anne.

He's too damaged to realise that perhaps that means something; that perhaps it means he doesn't need her at all.

Does that make him blind?


	71. Chapter 85

_Possibly cheesy but, oh well._

_Thank you so much for all of you who chose to respond to my last chapter. It made me feel that, even though the series is dying, there are still those who want to read._

_I hope you all stay with me._

* * *

Chase had been expecting fireworks, perhaps. A link. A tie. A bond that, over the years, never broke. He expected a soft, high pitch and a girlish giggle. She had a strange intonation. Her sentences always raised at the end. _This one time? At band camp? _He saw the movie recently on television. It so badly reminded him of her.

Anne is so fresh in his mind, so recent in his thoughts.

He's so far away in hers.

"It's been so long," she'd said, and he couldn't help but hear "What do you want from me?" even if the words weren't said. It's not paranoia, not in the simplest of terms. It's more an underestimation of what he means to people.

The minute Chase heard her voice he was sorry that he'd bothered her, turning up on her figurative doorstep like a bad penny, like a chain letter that never, ever died down.

"I – I just felt like you could help me."

The truth is, she couldn't.

The only person capable of helping Chase is Chase himself.

They had spoken for thirty minutes, talk of heartache and hope, adulthood, divorce. Lost dreams. Found dreams. _Children_. God, children. Chase listened intently, trying to hear hints of 'his' Anne in this grown woman that he no longer recognised. He found it in her laugh, in the way that she spoke his name but in nothing else.

"Even your accent is different," he'd whispered, unable to regulate, to mask the disappointment he inevitably felt.

If she heard it she didn't let on.

"I spent two years in England. Three in South Africa. I guess travelling changes a girl, Robert."

_You've changed. _

"I hardly hear any Sydney in you at all either, all those years in the US."

_I'm still me. Why aren't you? _

He didn't know, didn't realise that American had such an impact on him. To Chase, he sounds the way he's always sounded.

But she doesn't.

She'd asked how she could help him. What did he need to know? What did he need her to do? She'd do anything. Did he need to talk? Was he all alone? Was there something he needed for her to pass on? Was there someone he needed her to contact?

"If there's anything I can do to help you, Rob, I'll do that. Do you want to come home? Is that what it is? Are you afraid there'd be nobody here for you?"

He hadn't known how to answer. Yes, he'd wanted to scream. And no.

"I – I just – "

"I hate the idea of you feeling like you're alone."

But he's _not_ alone. He _does_ have someone to talk to. He told her that and she'd smiled. He could see it even without seeing her. He could hear her laugh, Anne's laugh but not his Anne's laugh. Anne's smile but not his Anne's smile.

"I have House."

"Then, why do you need me?"

"Because – " he'd began, but he didn't know how to finish.

Why _did_ he need her?

"I don't know."

"You always did underestimate yourself, Mr. Chase. You went through so much and you came out the other side. When I was falling to pieces after my husband left, who do you think I thought of?"

Chase. She'd thought of Chase.

But, why?

"Because, even as a kid that shouldn't have had to take care of himself, you pulled it all together. You think so little of your own abilities but you're the most able man I ever met. And I only knew you as a boy."

'His' Anne said he was a dag. A spunk, but a dag.

He chooses to listen to 'this' Anne, though.

* * *

"You look tired."

House doesn't know why Foreman sounds concerned. There's always something so patronising in his tone. Even when he's showing good will he sounds like he's trying to win a battle.

"New relationships are always this way, Foreman. You should go out and find yourself a woman. Or a whore. You'll understand the meaning of being up all night."

"Very funny, House. Have you been getting any sleep?"

"Sleep's overrated. Sleep's for the weak."

"Your mind's not on the job, House. If you're not sleeping your concentration's going to be shot to pieces. If there's a problem – "

"There's no problem."

Agitation. He snaps a little too hard, a little too fast.

His tiredness gets the better of him.

"Seriously, Foreman, if I can do my job a billion times better than you whilst high on Vicodin do you really think a couple of restless nights is going to alter my judgement? It's second to none."

"Yeah, aside from yourself."

"What's that supposed to mean? Did you get cryptic in your old age? 'Cause I have to tell you, I can solve the cryptic crossword in three minutes flat. And it's a big one."

"You're supposed to be running tests and twice today I've found you sleeping in your office. I don't need to remind you that we're working to deadlines here."

The patient's in rapid decline. His heart is failing. His kidneys have shut down.

He's an old man and he hasn't got much time left…but _this_ old man is catching forty winks at every opportunity he can get.

"The man's dying."

House stops dead. He knows Foreman's right but he won't back down.

He calls the man 'Cuddy' and asks how much the breast reduction cost.

"You might want to stay away from the sun lamps a little, Lisa. I don't need to remind YOU about the dangers of melanoma. You're looking a little…dark. It can't be good for your thick, Jewish skin."

The truth is, House is tired. He didn't sleep. He lay on the couch all night thinking, just thinking, and the sad fact is, he's no clearer.

He still doesn't know what he's doing; where he's going.

He still doesn't know what he's got himself into.

"For your information, _Foreman_, I've ran the tests. The cultures are still cooking and it was Masters' job to run the MRI. If you'd bothered to check you'd know that. But, by all means, give me the platitudes. Pretend that you care about what's going on at home."

"I care, House. But I have a job to do."

"So do I."

"Then, do it. He means a lot to all of us. But you can't give up on the universe just because you can't take your mind off one man."

Get a grip, Foreman says. It's the first time House has been forced to face the fact that he might actually be losing it.

The nod is barely perceptible.

It's there, though.

Defeat, perhaps, or just a concession?

* * *

The patient dies.

There is no blame, it's just the way that the world works. He was seventy-six. Smoked. Drank. His cholestorol was through the roof.

The disease that took him might've spared him had he been younger, fitter, healthier.

Whilst Foreman rues missed chances that would have made no difference at all, House can't bring himself to care.

It's amazing how much Chase brings a smile to his face when he walks through that front door to the smell of burnt toast, an effort taken a little too far but effort all the same.

"I cooked," Chase says, proudly. "My speciality."

"A half-wit's best effort."

"Hey, it was either that or a TV Dinner."

"Let me guess, you forgot how to use the microwave?"

The sheepish smile is affirmative. It's amazing he remembers how to turn on the cooker but somehow he manages to pull that together.

He cooked bacon. Tinned spaghetti. As a perfect example of improvisation, he half cooked a potato and threw that on the plate together with the other haphazard lacksadaisical ingredients to make what looks like a cheap, English meal.

He shrugs.

"It's the count that thoughts."

It's so wonderfully ridiculous that House doesn't bother to correct him. Instead he just puts his hand on Chase's shoulder; tells him that his idiocy truly does make the world a better place.

"After a long, hard day at work," Cuddy would say, "Rachel just makes it all better."

So does Chase.

Does that make House a pathetic father, laughing out loud at the inadequacies of his low intellect son? Or, is he just happy to see him?

The place is a mess. It's only when he sits down he notices. House imagines a tornado in a library. There is paper all over the floor. Pens and pencils. There are drawings and words strewn all over.

Medical encyclopedias are dotted in strategic places on the floor and the space in the middle indicates that Chase spent the day sat in the midst of it all.

Curiously, House raises an eyebrow.

"Have you been busy?"

"I've been reading."

"You can do that now?"

Chase shrugs. There's a dash of blue pen on the right side of his forehead but he doesn't appear to notice.

"Today I can."

"And tomorrow?"

Another shrug.

"We'll see."

The acceptance of his limitations is an amazing thing. Today he's okay with it. Tomorrow he might be throwing tantrums and kicking walls, might require restraint and medication to 'bring him down', but today he's at peace.

"Anne was helpful. I won't be talking to her again."

"You won't?"

"I've got you."

"Lucky me."

He says it as if it's a sarcastic sentiment but it burns in his chest like nothing ever has before, an acceptance, an embrace from a wild animal that doesn't let anyone close.

"How was your day?"

"Not good."

"Want to talk?"

"Patient died. I didn't win."

Chase is silent for a moment. He ponders the meaning. His smile fades. There's so much empathy in him but he doesn't know how to express it.

He places a hand on House's thigh as if that will help.

"Oh."

"He was old. Fat. Lazy."

Its almost like he's saying 'he deserved to die.'

"I'm still sorry."

"You didn't know him."

"No."

They're silent for a few moments. Chase sits beside House. They embrace the quiet. Still, the mess resonates around them, the scraps of paper, the books, the words, the tornado. It all resonates.

House wants to know what Chase has learned.

He's not sure he's asking about Chase as a person or Chase as a doctor with brain damage.

"I've been memorising. I put all the books in alphabetical order because my neuro doc says it's good for me. But it wasn't enough."

There comes a time when ABC is no longer enough.

A child needs to expand.

"I've been learning the body parts. I figured it might trigger something."

"And, has it?"

A pause.

"Not yet."

"Give it time."

House seems jaded. Chase can sense it. There's very little sarcasm and not a lot of wit. He leans back with his head on the couch and there's an emptiness in his eyes. Chase bites his lip, wondering how to proceed.

"You want me to show you?" he asks. House closes his eyes. Nods his head.

"Fire away."

It's all very simple to begin with as Chase places a hand on House's foot, gentle, not firm, because Chase has always been gentle.

He names some of the bones.

Metatarsal.

Talus.

Cuboid.

Navicular.

He looks up, blue eyes searching for affirmation, for encouragement, but House's eyes are closed. It's only the noises he makes that lead Chase to believe he should continue; he should go on.

Tibia.

Fibula.

Femur.

Patella.

"Very good."

He reaches the knee bone and it gives House a strange shiver through his tired, aching leg, almost as if the gentle touch of those fingers in his injured limb are enough to take the pressure from it.

But, Chase is no Vicodin and House is in pain.

He's been in pain all day.

He doesn't realise that so has Chase. His head aches with the pressure he's putting himself under but what was it Anne said?

"_It never mattered how much you were hurting. You still carried on."_

He reached his limit, though.

Everyone has their limit.

"I – I didn't learn any further than this because it stopped going in, but it's all in there. I took it all in. I repeated it over and over and it worked. I might've forgotten it all tomorrow but...I don't think I will have. It seems solid. Like the memory of you. I think I've locked it all in."

"That's great, Chase."

The voice is peaceful. Calm and dreamy. Chase fears he's losing him to sleep, doesn't know what to do. Doesn't know what to say.

He bites his lip.

He's trying so hard and he wants for it to matter.

"Did you want dinner?"

House puts his hand on Chase's head. He doesn't stroke, doesn't caress, but he does seek comfort from it.

"Just sit for awhile. Tell me those bones again."

He can't see it behind tired eyelids but House can sense Chase smile at the acceptance of his efforts.

His hand, it moves back down to House's foot. Gentle. So gentle.

Metatarsal, he says.

Cuboid.

Talus.

Navicular.

It's music to House's tired ears.

His boy is learning…and, isn't that just a symphony?


	72. Chapter 86

_Daft little chapter._

_(*)_

His enthusiasm had almost caused another head storm.

House had seen its inklings, its 'tender' beginnings as they caressed the sides of Chase's head last night. How hard he'd been trying to impress, to put forth a sense of being useful and better and progressive. So hard, House believes, that he'd have gone into fits and starts if he'd tried any harder.

This is the tragedy of Chase; that the harder her tries, the more his body rebels against him. It's almost as if he's sabotaging his own recovery.

He'd been stumbling over words. At first he'd been an adequate distraction for House, a rhythmic, hypnotic lull in the man's tired, aching mind but when the smoothness had turned sharp as Chase's coherency lessened it'd stopped being so comforting.

Sometimes that boy doesn't even realise how hard he hits people.

As Chase tires, as he pushes, it becomes evident in his speech. As he forces on, it hurts him physically.

House had told him he didn't have to impress him any longer, that House himself was tired, that he'd sleep safe in the knowledge that Chase could indeed be his Phone a Friend on Millionaire if the topic happened to be the bones of the lower limbs.

"It's good to know you've put your time to something that could net us some cash, Chase, honestly."

Tiredness causes bluntness in House. The look on Robert's face had been one of complete and utter desolation, of kicked puppy, of child showing Daddy his First Place rosette only to be told it was worthless. It's a sign of low esteem, House knows, but he was too tired and in pain to do anything about that.

The way Chase had blinked repeatedly, however, that was a sign of something more.

House is never too tired to deal with Chase's pain.

Chase said nothing of it. House had wondered if he was starting to mask things for his benefit; had saw himself so long ago in the boy that now resides beside and within him.

He'd reached up as Chase gasped, as he choked almost imperceptibly against the growing pressure in his temples.

"Small steps, remember?" House had told him.

He hadn't meant to sound dismissive of it. Of him.

"You can tell me all of this again tomorrow when your head isn't pounding and you don't resemble Casper about to die a second time over."

"Like always, huh? Repeating myself because I forget, right? Ridiculous."

He had sounded so sad. Self deprecating. He had scratched his nail against the couch absently, refusing to look up.

"I happen to like your repetition."

"…your glitching computer. Your broken record. I'm a barrel of laughs."

"I was always a fan of scratched vinyl. Gives it a vintage feel, you know?"

"Yeah."

Chase had nodded lifelessly, humourlessly, and had taken himself off to bed. At 3am, when he should've been sleeping, House could hear him in the walls repeating his words over and over again. After awhile they became less rigid, less bone-like. Flimsier, as he became flimsier.

"Tibia. Fib-Fib….damn it, why can't I do this?"

Poor kid couldn't even remember the basics.

Since he wouldn't take a pill, House had given him a glass of water laced with something extra at 4 until finally, ten minutes later, there was silence. Underhanded, yes, but he's pretty certain Cuddy laces Rachel's bottle when she won't sleep either.

When something consumes Chase it takes all of him.

It's determination. But, it's damaging, too.

(*)

He steals him a skeleton as an act of encouragement.

"This way, you might actually save your own skin."

Moving on from scribbled notes, Chase had taken to writing the names of the bones all over himself, crude letters in black ink. He looked like a Maori warrior by the end of his first sitting.

It had taken an hour and a half to get the pen off him before his day-patient appointment with Dr Emmett and House had not wanted him to look psychotic. There's always a risk of him being held overnight and, whilst there's an agreement there already, it's scheduled in-patient care. Anything unscheduled would solely be down to perceived mental instability.

Emmett has the right to put Chase on lockdown if he feels it necessary and, with vivid black letters marking out every part of him, that might just look a little bizarre on the outside.

"Of all the days, Chase."

"I know, I know."

"Anyone would think you WANT to be tied up and psychoanalysed."

"Will you just shut up and help me? My arm's starting to ache. All this scrubbing…"

"Well, you should've thought about that before you turned yourself into Michael Schofield."

"Who the Hell is Michael Schofield, House? Please."

House had wondered when he'd start drawing on the walls, hence the skeleton.

There is no grave digging. There is no disruption of Earth or dredging up of past victims. There is no macabre, no Stephen King, no Dean Koontz. There is just a man wanting to encourage a whim, a fad and a useful obsession in a man whose attention span is close to zero.

Chase's fascination with bones and body parts is not that of a serial killer but that of a former med student turned dependent and, if a model of a human without skin and soul is something that will keep him focused then House is certain the orthopaedic training centre won't really begrudge him its 'loan'.

"You can label the parts. It'll be cool. The visuals might help the subject matter stay in that tiny brain of yours without you having to give yourself a head storm trying to conjure something up."

It's amazing how 'Harold' (so named for a character from Neighbours who Chase finds defines something, though he can't quite recall what) and a pad of yellow post it notes hold him, this man-child, this creature that House cannot look beyond.

The skeleton, House believes, represents the both of them. They're both raw here. They're both stripped away, Chase literally, House more figuratively.

"I love him," Chase says, posting another mis-spelled but correctly named label to the inanimate creature's frame. "Where did you get him?"

"The skeleton fairy left him all set up for you. She wasn't impressed by your crude attempts at drawing."

"Did you steal him?"

He doesn't look condemning when he says this. He looks impressed.

"I could've just gone out and bought you one. The version in Toys R Us is much cuter, shall we say, but I figured only the best for my little boy."

"Well, he's awesome."

Spoken like a truly impressed teenage boy.

Chase reaches up, touches the tip of its head with his finger. He does it with his bad arm and it's awkward but House internally notes the progress, figures the physio has been doing some good at least. They're still talking surgery to free up some of the scar tissue but Chase won't even hear of it.

House understands why. He understands that fear.

He understands that Chase is terrified that something will go wrong and they'll end up cutting that arm off at the shoulder like he'd once almost had to do. He happens to like his arm.

"He's as tall as me, is Harold."

"Don't flatter yourself, stoopy."

"And, look at his head. It's as broken as mine."

There's a truth in that. This is an old model kept around due to budget cuts and an unwillingness for anyone to put their hands in their pockets. Effectively, House has stolen a representation of PPTH's stingy purse strings because they've been campaigning for a new one for years.

Harold 'fell' some years back. People like to say he's a victim of domestic violence; the inanimate personification of 'that old chestnut'.

The hairline fractures in his skull have never healed.

The note Chase attaches to its skull reads "mine is cooler" because Chase is proud of how symmetrical his shattered skull is; how the pattern is patchwork now that it's mended. Reminds him of a French Bistro table, he says, those pale white lines the tapestry in the tiles.

"Chicks dig scars and mine really are the best."

At least he sees something positive in all of this.

(*)

When House wakes up on the couch with a Post It stuck to his forehead he wonders if he's created a monster.

Old, it says. Just old.

The one on his bum leg reads "2nd BSET" and it takes him all but ten seconds to decipher its meaning. There is no code as many would imagine. There is no acronym.

To Chase, that reads perfectly. To his newly dyslexic brain that word is perfectly formed.

Second best, it reads.

If Chase's scars are Numero Uno then House's are not far behind.

(*)

"CCTV shows you walking out with it under your arm, House. How can you say it wasn't you that took it?"

House would love to bury his face in Cuddy's breasts, to plead forgiveness whilst inhaling the soft, sweet musk of her silicone.

"My face is up here, House."

"Oh, really? So I'm not supposed to be drawn down there?"

"For one second would you just act like something other than a fifteen year old?"

He looks up, all attention focused on her. It seems like such an obvious waste of time to call a meeting over a worthless piece of plastic but, such is life. Such are Cuddy's priorities.

"So, I borrowed a piece of hospital equipment. Are you trying to tell me that you haven't taken a stethoscope home so that you and lover boy can play Doctors and Nurses together? Of course, I could be wrong. He might be into something more hardcore. I had trouble finding a catheter tube earlier on. Is that one of his fetish…"

" – ENOUGH. All I ask is that you return it. We only have one. It's a necessary piece of teaching equipment. If this is some sort of faux fraternity prank then you're even more juvenile than I thought."

"It's keeping him focused, alright?"

He doesn't know if it's because he's tired or what. He doesn't know why this little glimpse of honesty falls from his lips but it does.

He doesn't know why he lets her see this side of him…but he does.

"It's helping him."

Emmett would say he's trying to appeal to her; that he's making himself vulnerable to her because he wants something. House would say he had four hours sleep because he couldn't stand the throbbing in his leg and he's just too tired to keep up the pretense.

Cuddy is silent.

She doesn't know what to say.

"The idiots need it. Tell me he doesn't need it more."

"He's quite welcome to visit the library. The teaching rooms. I've never said he couldn't."

"But people would be watching him."

"So? He's never been performance shy, House."

She doesn't get it.

She doesn't that the reason he performs so badly at times is because he's so terrified to fail, that this Chase is not the Chase they knew and loved but the younger version, the one that hadn't build up that confidence, that faux thick skin.

She's dim sometimes.

"Buy a new model, Cuddy. You've spent enough money having your office re-decorated. God forbid you use that cash for something this hospital actually needs."

Exasperated, she speaks to the back of him as he heads for the door.

"I could have you arrested, you know? This is theft of hospital property."

"Yeah, it is. You could. But you won't."

Cuddy wonders why her daughter won't do as she's told.

It's because she's all talk.

It's because she never follows through.

(*)

"I'm learning," Chase tells Emmett, calm today, sitting quietly in a chair in that grand old office of his. He doesn't mind it here now. He prefers it to talking with people who know him, people who look upon him with the pity of those that don't recognise him any more.

He doesn't mind it here now that he knows it's not punishment; abandonment.

"My memory's getting better. I still struggle if I'm tired but the span's getting longer. Foreman's impressed, anyway. I can just about beat him at cards now."

He no longer gets the feeling that Foreman is letting him win.

"And, how are you feeling?"

"Not so angry any more."

"You often express anger. Frustration. We talked last time we met about why that was."

"Because I struggle getting my points across and I hate being dependent. Because it's irritating when your body doesn't comply with what you're trying to get it to do."

"That's right. You seem a lot more focused today. A lot calmer."

"Yeah," Chase smiles. "Yeah, I am. I'm doing good."

It's the first time Emmett has heard anything like self praise from this particular patient, a man with intelligence that simply no longer translates the way that he wants it to.

His guardian must be doing something right after all.

He watches as Chase kicks his foot against the carpet. It's very young. He's very young.

He's also very honest. Emmett wonders how much of that is symptom of a damaged brain and how much is just this young man's personality.

"House stole me a skeleton," he smiles. "His name's Harold. He and I are becoming good friends."

Sometimes, Chase just doesn't think before he speaks.

Emmett looks up, old eyes meeting young ones.

"Is that right?"

House would just kick him right now if he heard those words.

He'd kick _himself_ if his leg wasn't killing him, if his whole limb wasn't burning up into his thigh, into his hip pouring through him and into him like white-heat. He imagines a whirling pool of bacteria washing across the sands of his body and it sickens him.

This is lava.

The pain is a tsunami and he can no longer tread the water.

He lies on the couch in his office and tries to catch his breath. It's difficult to see past the dots that dance across his vision. It's difficult to breathe through the suffocating agony of that damn useless mass of tissue.

He touches the leg. Second best, indeed. House wonders how on Earth he neglected to notice the burning infection that's raging right the way through him.

Then again, he's no longer his own priority, is he?

It figures.

When he's found he's on the periphery of consciousness. There is an empty bottle of Vicodin resting on the floor beside him. In his stubborn despair he'd outdone himself.

This is no cry for help. This is no suicide is just a man who could not cope with his own pain because Chase's was enough for him to bear.

House has always thought of himself as invincible when he knows quite well that he's not.

"House," Cuddy whispers as she crouches down beside him. Her fingers touch anxiously over the livid red skin of his exposed leg. She's not digging his scars but fearing them in this moment. "You're in a hospital, for God's sake. Did you think you could take care of this yourself?"

He'd written prescriptions for antibiotics. They're scattered all over his desk along with the empty syringes used to administer them.

He'd been…desperate.

"Why didn't you as for help?"

Of you, he wants to ask? Ask help of you?

He says nothing. He's just thankful to let go for a little while.

"Get him into a room," he hears. "Don't let him leave."

He's her prisoner now. She won't sit back and watch him crumble.

"And get a tox screen done. God only knows how many he's taken. He might need a gastric lavage."

How far he's fallen, he thinks.

How far he's fallen, his head in Cuddy's lap, his stomach about to be pumped like the frat boy she accused him of being not so long ago.

"You're an idiot, House," she says, though the way she strokes her hand across his forehead is tenderness he doesn't deserve from her.

"Thank you," he replies, though his words are forced through grates of pain spoken though a mouthful of glass.

His last thought before he gives in is of Chase. His Chase. His property. His toy that's broken. Who will take care of him now? Who will take care of him whilst House takes care of himself?

He's never been this selfless.

It's almost like a symptom of his own, an infection in his blood and his soul that might never, ever be cured.


	73. Chapter 87

_Next Chapter._

_Thanks to all that are still around. Thanks for all the wonderful reviews. There are a few little adventures coming up and not all of them involve both House and Chase._

_They're having some time apart. It might just be good for them, aw._

_PS not very good. Just is what it is. There's more but its not quite ready yet. And the 'more' is a mixture of light and dark and bright and shaded. That's all I can say really. _

_Crisis of confidence is just my thing. _

_(*)_

Time passes slowly to Chase. His brain, slowed down by its own lack of memory and processing speed, imagines five minutes to be an hour. For children it's the same. Their heads race so fully that any amount of downtime feels like eons passed when in truth it's just tiny segments. How many times will a child ask "Are we nearly there yet?" when they've been travelling just seconds. The passage of time to their developing brains is excruciating.

To Chase, five minutes late might as well be a week. He's not a child but in some ways he functions as one. Ever since he learned to tell the time again he's been obsessed with it. Routines. Layouts. He sticks to them rigidly. It gives him a sense of control over what and how he does things.

It's 4.10 and he's still not here.

It starts with an antsy sense of discomfort because he knows that House is late. It develops into questions, questions in his mind. Where is he? Why isn't he here? Then there is the definition, his black and white logic. It doesn't shift. Mitigation means nothing.

He's _meant_ to be here. He's _supposed_ to be here.

Chase doesn't understand that sometimes in life there are aversions and hold-ups. They deviate from his carefully planned, carefully timed existence and, to Chase, deviations are painful and unwanted. They mess with his head. They create disarray he cannot abide.

4.12. Still nothing.

"Do you know if he's here yet?" he asks the lady on reception, his thumbnail pressed hard against his teeth. "Has he just stepped out for awhile?"

"I'm sorry, he hasn't signed in."

"But, he's late."

"Just give him a minute. Relax. Get yourself a glass of water. Would you like me to change channel for you? I'm sure there's some football on somewhere…"

He smiles politely but the nerves are frayed and on show. He bounces on his feet. Left. Right. Sways as if he cannot stand straight.

"I'll just sit for a moment," he replies.

To Chase, that moment might as well be a year.

(*)

4.20.

He waits at the collection point in that black leather chair and he scratches his finger against his thighs. He's attempting to calm. To self regulate. This is what he does when he's not biting his nails. On the outside he's preoccupied.

On the inside, he's panicking.

He pulls himself up, stumbling a little on his unsteady leg. He tries to crane his neck to look outside, can't hold back the frustrated sound that irks the back of his throat.

"He might be caught in traffic," he's told gently, though his logic is sound when he asks "Then, why hasn't he called? He has a cellphone."

"He might be driving. You can't use your cellphone when driving, Robert, it's against the law."

"But he should be _here_ by now. He shouldn't still be driving."

"He might've left late."

"Then, why didn't he call to let me know?"

She gives up. It's frustrating talking to a man who thinks in such monochrome shades. He's wearing a grey sweatshirt but that colour doesn't exist to him any more. There's nothing she can say. It reminds her of speaking with her seven year old grandson.

He's got an answer for everything, too.

(*)

4.25 and Chase is bouncing off the walls, figuratively if not literally though literally can't be far away.

"Honey, you're going to have a heart attack if you don't stop stressing. Just put your feet up. Watch the game. If there was a problem we'd know about it."

She tries to leave him be but his stress is infecting the air in this place. It's putting her off her work.

He tells her she doesn't understand. This isn't fair, he thinks. This isn't _right_.

"I understand you need to sit down and calm down, son. This isn't the place for getting worked up and I say that for your own good."

She does.

Chase doesn't listen.

He checks his phone once. Twice. He calls House's number nine times in three minutes, frustrated by the sound of that generic answering phone message that he keeps getting through to. It's not even House's voice but a woman, a woman's voice, a woman he doesn't know.

"_We're sorry, the person you have called is unavailable at present. Please leave a message after the tone."_

"Damn it."

He looks up. His eyes look bluer than they have done all day.

If she looked closely she might see the fire in them.

"Is this another trick? Is Dr Emmett going to lead me down that corridor any second now and lock the door behind me?"

Paranoia breeds contempt.

How he hates the world right now.

"You just have to wait, Robert. Count to ten. Do your breathing. Don't let it own you."

She means the agitation. The fear. The anger.

Ten minutes pass. Fifteen.

To Chase it's a lifetime.

A lifetime passed and House still isn't here.

He tries to keep himself calm but it feels like there's something working against him.

(*)

After thirty minutes he's reached a crescendo, peaked and then fallen. His hands are curled in tight fists, crescent scratches forming in his palms. He tenses so hard his shoulder aches and his elbow throbs. He's certain he'll have a headache come the turn of the hour.

When the anger dissipates all that's left is the fear. The sadness. The heartfelt resignation.

His doctor stands above him having finished typing up his recommendations in another room for a patient he feels he can no longer deal with; a patient who needs an urgent transfer. A patient that isn't Robert Chase who is still within the realms of his help.

The tiny words his patient speaks are heartbreaking.

"He's left me again, hasn't he? I should never have trusted him."

A sigh. His arms fall. Emmett sits down beside him and places a hand on his shoulder. Chase flinches because it hurts, because he's tensed his muscles to such a point he'll need massage to release them, but doesn't pull away.

He smiles sadly.

"Let me guess. Room 232, right? The one with the garden view beyond the bars? You don't have to force me. I'll go quietly."

He's waiting for that grip to become firm.

He's waiting to be told he _can't_ leave.

"It's nothing like that, Robert. You know yourself how unreliable he can be. He'll be here."

Never to me, he whispers. He's never unreliable to me. And he won't. He _won't_ be here.

"Look," he pleads. "I can get home by myself. I can be by myself. I can take care of myself. I did it for years. I don't _need_ him. I don't need anyone."

They both know that's not true. That's why he can't leave without his guardian signing him out; because, in the eyes of professionals he _is _vulnerable. Incapable. They both know it's not right that he can be alone, that he _should_ be alone. That's why he's here in the first place.

"I don't _need _him. I just want to go."

"Do you understand why you feel this way, Chase? Do you know why you're so upset now?"

"Please, stop trying to analyse me. We're out of time."

They both know the answer, though. They both know it's because he needs House like he needs oxygen; like he needs sunlight on his face to keep the darkness at bay

Emmett pats his shoulder comfortingly, almost fatherly.

"Just give him a little while longer, Chase. Then we'll see what options we have."

Ominous words spoken in such a gentle tone.

"Options. Right."

How Chase hates this man sometimes, gentle or not.

(*)

They play chess whilst they wait, Chase and Emmett, a game of strategy that it's quite clear Chase will not understand. He relates to the pawn, pushed around at will. Is that him? Is that Chase?

He lifts up the piece in his fingers, clearly distracted. He stares as it as if it has answers for him.

"It even looks like me. Look at its stupid face."

It has his jawline, he thinks, sharp and angled. He has a crown, though, a crown beneath his scalp made of metal and steel. It keeps his brain from falling out. Does that make him a King?

He pushes the piece a little. The King falls.

That's fitting.

For a moment there is silence as he ponders his move. None of his previous moves have brought forth any contemplation whatsoever. He's simply guessed.

"Do you remember the rules?" Emmett asks as Chase moves randomly, as he pushes his pieces with no foresight at all. He'd said he liked chess. A master at med school, he said, though it had been years since he played.

It's the concentration that fails him. That and the anxiety.

He picks up that King and he presses his finger down hard into its head. The King's head remains in place…but Chase's thumb is bruised by the pressure.

"My dad used to play chess. I used to ask him to teach me but he never had time. Had this old antique chess board in his office at home. My mum used it as a drinks tray when he left her. He used to polish it every day and she put rings all over it. I used to laugh about that."

Sensing underlying tension about to bubble over, Emmett averts his patient. His voice is soft. Soft. Comforting. Gentle. He's good at de-escalating and, though Chase does not trust him, he clearly wants to please him.

"Lets try something else, shall we?" Emmett says, pulling out the flash cards. "I hear you're an expert at these things."

So Foreman says.

Chase, in a moment of total insecurity, simply folds his arms. Refuses to even entertain the idea.

Not quite so eager to please, then.

"I just want to go home."

It's all he can see at the minute.

His one-track mind won't let anything else exist but that.

(*)

After forty-five minutes the phone finally rings. Chase's trembling fingers press that button and his anger erupts.

"Where are you?" he yells. "House, this isn't funny."

He's expecting a joke. A sarcastic turn of phrase. In his fantasy world he might even be expecting an apology but the voice isn't House. It isn't what Chase wants to hear.

"Chase, it's James."

Wilson. He calls himself James when he's not speaking to House. It's more personal. It's…nicer.

"I've been waiting for hours."

_Minutes, more like._

"I'm sorry. I should've called sooner."

"They're going to keep me here if he doesn't show up. Do you know what that _means_? I'm not staying here. I'm not."

Wilson dreads to think. He dreads to think would happen to Chase, clearly agitated and unable to regulate, should the doors slam closed on him again.

"Just…stay where you are. I'll be there as soon as I can, alright?"

"But, House needs to – "

" – Chase, House can't come."

"Why not?"

Wilson doesn't want to tell him over the phone. He doesn't know how he will react. He doesn't want to panic him whilst there's nobody there to calm him down.

"Wilson, where is he? Did something happen?"

The sense of fear is suffocating. It presses on his chest the same way some of those rocks under the ground did.

This is a more ominous fear, though.

"Ten minutes, alright? I'll be there in ten minutes."

"Wilson," Chase pleads, but the line is dead and he's left hanging in silence. "Wilson, please…"

_Please, just tell me. I'm not a child. _

_Please just tell me. _

_I can't stand this any longer. _

_(*)_

_And, the Queen of Hearts, she whispers "Off with his head…"_

How Cuddy loves to talk down to him; to scold him as if he were one of her children.

"What have you done to yourself, House? You can't do things like this any more. Don't you realise that?"

House, with glazed eyes and a frown meant only for her, asks her what gives her the right to criticise.

"I'm worried. Of course I'm worried. I'm worried you'd neglect yourself like this."

His leg's infected, the blood flow compromised. There's a clot. It's purple and black against the scar tissue. At this point he can no longer feel his foot. No matter how many arguments he puts forth he knows he's not leaving this room until the infection is gone…or, the leg is a mere ghost. An empty space where it used to rot.

"This must've been festering for days. The pain must've been - "

" – barely worse than the pain I live with daily, Cuddy. Hence my love of pharmaceuticals. It's the same as your love of cheap shoes and push up bras."

His throat burns. When he swallows he can still taste the bile; the residue of one-too-many Vicodin that never quite managed to escape him. He slept through the gastric lavage. For that, he's thankful. Medical procedures make him pity Chase all the more, having to submit to them constantly at his very hands.

He's practically floating now. Floating on drugs and air.

"What did you think would happen, Greg? Did you think you were so invincible it'd just wash over you?"

House doesn't have an answer for that.

He barely even notices her use of his first name.

"What do you think will happen now that you're here? You think he's going to magically step up to the plate and become an independent adult?"

"I don't know, Cuddy. Since you're the fountain of all knowledge and goodness why don't _you_ tell me?"

He's too far gone for wit and sarcasm, too wasted for continual clever rebuttals.

He's too scared for humour, if he's honest with himself.

"I thought I could handle it," he says honestly.

He knows, deep in his heart, that if the Levaquin and blood thinners don't work he could lose the leg but somehow it never quite registered as important. House ceased to exist the minute he climbed down into that death trap beneath the ground, his own being and persona and importance replaced by blond hair, blue eyes; redemption in human form.

They say that when you become a father your own life pales into insignificance.

House never had a child…

"If you need anything," she says softly, knowing above all things that she'll be the last person he'll ask.

"I'll just holler. Even if it's 2am and I know your daughter's sleeping. I'll be sure to call so you can traipse all the way back down here and feed me a strawberry. I'm sure you'll come running, Florence Nightingbreasts."

She doesn't even have the decency to look offended.

It's the look of pity that bothers him more.

"Just rest," she says. "You're going to need it."

He picks up a rolled up gauze that's been left by the side of his bed and it narrowly misses her head as she's walking away.

His missiles aren't just verbal but she's the one that hit him hard.

(*)

"Take me to him."

"Chase, you're exhausted. You've had a long day. He's had a long day. You don't need to worry about House. He'll be fine. He's probably sleeping. He's on a lot of medication."

"Fine. You won't take me? I'll walk."

The car stops at a set of lights. Wilson isn't expecting Chase to tear off his seatbelt and actually open the door.

Is he that reckless? Is he that desperate?

"_Alright_, okay. Just close the door, Chase. Get back in the car."

"And you'll take me to him?"

Wilson swallows hard. What can he do? What can he say?

"It's better if you just – "

" - I'm not a child. I can handle it."

Wilson is nothing if not honest.

"Frankly, Chase, I don't think you can."

His honesty, at times, has been a burden. A curse, as well as a blessing. It's why House likes him so much, because he can be read as easily as anything and because he sees no reason to be untruthful.

He's also easily duped.

Chase isn't easily put off, though. He's a dog with a bone. Wilson's never seen him this purposeful.

"You think I didn't have a billion visits to my mother when she was sick? You think I didn't have to sit at her bedside while they tried to restore her liver function? I got used to it."

"That's admirable, Chase, but things are different now."

"Why? Because I got hurt? People trusted me to take care of myself back then. I was fifteen."

Wilson wants to remind him he's not much older than that now mentally; that back then was before a serious head injury and years and years of regression.

Wisely, he keeps quiet. Concedes just to pacify the boy.

"Just…close the door. You might have an iron skull but you're not unbreakable."

(*)

It's a shock to say the least.

"House," Chase whispers as he leans in the doorway. "I – I'm sorry…"

House looks grey in that bed. Tired. Less of a king. Less of a citadel. Chase is reminded that the man is human and it shocks him in the same way it did the one and only time he saw his father cry. He'd been nine years old. He found out through his mother that it was the anniversary of Rowan Snr's death, the father he loved, the father he could never live up to.

For once in his life, Chase felt a camaraderie with his dad.

It's different when its someone you care about. Is this how he makes House feel? This helpless? This afraid?

He wants to run, run away from this, hide from this, escape from this. At the same time he can't look away.

"Don't look at me like that, four eyes" House smiles, putting on a brave face though it's weak. He's weak. "I'm not dead yet. Years left in me _and_ this leg. Worry about your own. I'm just being lazy here."

"He'd do anything to get out of clinic duty," Wilson concedes, "but this, House, this is even pushing it by your standards."

"Oh, come on, Wilson. You know if that's all it was I'd have handed them to Marsters. She's always eager to please and if a few hours extra clinic duty are going to get her extra credit she'll do it."

"What happened?" Chase asks. "What's wrong?"

House tries to break it down. Explain it in stages. First they'll do this. Then this. Then he'll run a marathon. He thinks of Chase putting arms around him, warning him as one might warn an autistic kid that he was going to hug him.

Looking at him now he wishes he'd hugged him back.

"I just wanted to see you. I thought that old bastard wasn't going to let me out. I thought you'd left me there again. Hated you for a minute. "

"That's why I sent Cavalier King Charles Wilson, so you didn't have to sleep in a rubber room where the sheep are in straitjackets so you can't count them."

"It was humiliating having to be signed out, House. Like I was in school."

"Sucks to be you, Bob. When you finally come of age you can sign yourself out."

"Yeah, yeah."

Wilson sighs as he leans in the doorway. It's strange. House was once his best friend but now he exists on the periphery. House always said Wilson would grow up, marry six times over, have fifteen children and leave him behind.

"_You'll end up being the responsible divorcee ten times over with billions of little Wilsons to pay child support for .You'll leave poor old me behind to wallow in the sense of my own doomed existence." _

That wasn't to be, it seems.

House is the one with responsibility now whist Wilson looks on in bewilderment.

"And you," House calls over. "I thought I told you to take him home and put Spongebob on for him. Make sure he ate dinner and brushed his teeth before bed. Was that so hard, Jimmy? Was little Robbie so hard to handle?"

"I tried to get him to go home but he wouldn't listen. He was insistent. I don't remember him being this determined before. I'm sure that's not _your _influence, House. Couldn't possibly be."

"You could've just carried on driving."

"And have him end up in here next to you for trying to jump out of a moving vehicle? And no, I'm not exaggerating."

"You did that?"

Robert says nothing.

He did that. It almost, almost makes House swell with pride. Then he remembers the danger in the act and says nothing. He can't encourage it no matter how it makes him feel, that sort of reckless behaviour. He can't condone it no matter how it makes his head expand in its own space, in the sense of his own worth.

"My company is sought after. My darling duckling would do anything to be near me. He's as loyal as a Labrador. Isn't that right, cool breeze?"

Chase bows his head, places it on House's knees. It doesn't hurt. He just wants to rest there for a moment.

His voice is muffled and tired.

This is taking its toll on him mentally and he can't hide any more.

"Stop making jokes. Stop being funny. It's really serious, House. "

"So's cancer, Chase. I haven't got that. If I did have I'd be spending far too much time with Wilson over there. I'd also be bald and Taub would think I was cramping his style. I'm not going to shake free the mortal coil like your old man did. What do you take me for? A copycat?"

"Stop it."

_Please._

"Just stop it."

He's serious. House can feel that.

Even House has his limits, his lines he won't cross.

When Chase tells him how scared he's been he feels it deep in his stomach, a pain he can't shake, a stabbing, gut-wrenching agony that won't abate.

"Hey," House says, softly, and he _does_ touch him now. A soft pat. A gentle comfort. "Chase, come on. Stop that. Stop worrying. It'll give you lines on that smooth, boyish face of yours. You don't want to look like an aging homo do you? You've got years left in that pretty boy face of yours before that happens if you just stop worrying."

Chase just goes still. Putty in his hands. He just rests there, breathing in, breathing out, inhaling House's sickness as if he could somehow take it.

"Will he be okay?" Wilson asks and it seems strange asking that to the man in the bed.

"He'll be fine. Drama queen just needs a little attention, that's all."

House rolls his tired eyes in Wilson's direction and acts like he's simply tolerating it. Still, it's a strange world for Wilson to bear witness to, especially when House leans down, totally unperturbed, and whispers words that cannot be heard.

It feels almost voyeuristic. It feels like the floor has been pulled from under him.

It's so intimate, so personal that Wilson has to look away.

House tells Chase that this is all just a great big overreaction; that he'll be out of here in no time.

Chase, again, remains quiet.

(*)

They stay like that for awhile, suspended in the time that Chase could not abide. For that same while the older men say nothing. Then, House breaks the silence, aware only of the spectacle he's putting on, this broken man and his broken boy propping each other up, holding each other together.

He cracks a joke but it's masking something deeper.

"He'll be asleep any minute. I'd put money on it. Watch and learn, Jimmy. You'll be doing this yourself pretty soon."

"I never had you down as a calming presence, House. More a gnat that bites repeatedly."

"Clearly you're wrong about me."

Spoken in jest but also in truth.

"Half a brain here simply can't function without me. I'm like his puppeteer."

Certainly, he carved part of what Chase is today. He pulls his strings like nobody else can.

That's why Chase needs him so much.

He looks up, his eyes wide and empty but full all the same, deep and painful and brimming with something neither House nor Wilson are ready to engage.

It's intense. He's intense.

He's everything he never was before.

"Are you going to be okay? Don't lie to me, House. I'll know. I'm not stupid. I might have half a brain but I haven't got half a mind."

"Well, that's questionable, isn't it? You put your underwear on backwards the other day and forgot how to tie your own shoelaces. That's stupid. Doesn't show an absolute presence of mind, now, does it?"

"I'm not stupid. I can handle it."

That's a rigid voice, there and then. House hears it well. Wilson too.

"Just…tell me the truth."

"Talk to him, House. He deserves that."

There's a decision to be made here. To coddle him? To comfort him with lies or to empower him with trust and truth? To bend it so that he sleeps well tonight? To preserve what fragile grasp he has on the world by making him believe it's alright?

Is that fair?

House opts for truth. Brutal. Honest.

"I don't know," he says, and that's the simplest form of anything right now. He just doesn't know. "I don't know if I'm okay. But, when have I ever been, Chase? You used to know that."

There's a lot of truths that Chase can no longer remember. In this moment they've never been further from him.

"I used to know a lot of things."

"And you will. But right now I just need you to do as I ask you."

He nods his head. Accepts that for what it is. When he feels Wilson's presence it doesn't push him or pull him or jar him. It simply confirms things.

"He needs to rest, Chase. Infection responds to rest."

"Rest and good old fashioned 'nuke 'em' techniques," House interjects.

Chase nods again. He looks up at Wilson then back at House. Softly, he places a hand over House's chest as if searching for his heartbeat.

He looks him deep in the eye, man to man.

"I'll come back tomorrow?" he asks, hopeful, small. "Or I could stay?"

"Go home with Wilson, Chase. He's a lapdog but he'll let you have the run of the house. That is, if his girlfriend doesn't object."

"She left," Wilson says, sadly. "But you already knew that, didn't you? You think I don't know you've got my emails hacked?"

"I have to keep an eye on my idiot friends. I was going to send a condolence card but…as you can see, life just got in the way. So you can play babysitter until Daddy's well enough to pick up the glove again. You'll behave yourself, won't you, Robbie?"

Chase says nothing. He just looks scared.

He hasn't heard a word of it, preoccupied by the IV in House's arm; the liquid hanging high above him feeding him life and comfort.

"Are you going to lose it?"

"The leg? Or, my mind?"

"Either?"

House doesn't answer because what can he say?

"Just go home, Chase. I'll see you in the morning."

There's only so much truth the boy can handle.

(*)


	74. Chapter 88

_Another little Chapter xxxx_

_(*)_

Wilson is introduced to House's life with the apprehension of one who had not quite understood the magnitude of all of this, the sacrifice that House is making for 'one of his own'.

He knew that House was putting himself out for Chase – but he didn't know just how much.

"Makes you respect me all the more, doesn't it, Jimmy? That I'm SO put upon by that poor, blond idiot."

"Just tell me what I need to know."

He hadn't expected much, just a few tips and recommendations. He hadn't expected House, in a moment of free thought and blessed mercy from that raging, damning infection, to give him a lilting monologue.

"I hope you've got a pen and paper, Wilson. I know how you like to note everything down."

"I'll be fine, House."

"If you're sure…"

The list is huge. What Chase can do, what he can't do, what he needs help with and what he does not. There are signs to look out for if a head storm is impending, signals that an absence seizure might be on its way and he'll require monitoring overnight.

There are techniques implemented should things start getting rough, particular scents that tend to calm him should he begin to feel edgy. House mentions lavender drops on his pillow and it almost, almost sends Wilson cascading into another dimension because he doesn't understand the world he's stepped into.

"Wait a minute. You put lavender oil on his pillow?"

"Cameron's idea. Before she ceased to exist she gave me a few pointers on what worked best on his tired, stressed little doctor's mind. I stopped her before she could get into his bathing rituals. I figure the simpler the better in that regard."

A wicked smile as he reminds himself.

"Up until a few weeks ago he needed help getting into the tub. He's a big boy now. He can bathe himself. Don't let him have longer than ten minutes, though. He tends to fall asleep in there and there's always the risk of drowning."

He says the word 'drowning' as if it's a bad word. Whispered. Dramatised. Wilson is so taken aback he says nothing.

"What about medication?"

"He usually remembers to take his meds at bedtime but remind him anyway. He's got holes in his brain, you see. Wasn't sure if you knew."

"What about his lungs? Foreman says they get pretty bad sometimes, especially if he's been in a smoky environment."

He'd know. House still resents him for his utter lack of regard in that sense.

"He's been okay recently but that can change pretty suddenly. If he's croaking like a tree frog check is O2 sats. I keep a nebuliser at home in case he needs it and if it gets really bad he'll need oxygen. I'm sure your little bald kids taught you the value of pure air."

He speaks these words as if they mean nothing. As if they're nothing. He lays out this life as if it's casual and everyday and truly no big deal.

This is their life, Wilson thinks.

This is their life – and House chose it.

"He usually starts crashing at 10. He'll fight it. Little koala fiend's like a three year old not wanting to miss anything. Don't let him sleep on the couch. It's not good for his arm. Oh, and he's got a support wrap for when he goes to sleep. He'll tell you he doesn't need it but I generally threaten to restrain him and that does the job. His love of bondage doesn't seem to have transferred, post brain bludgeon."

There is that, at least.

"Anything else I should know?" 

House ponders this for a moment. He bites his lip as if searching for something of importance in the great, grand madness of his existence.

Finally he remembers.

"YES. You'll have to make time for Harold too. Damn thing's like a security blanket for him."

"And Harold is…?"

A smile. Oh, but that's a good smile.

"You'll see."

Wilson expects a stuffed animal. A hare, perhaps. A teddy bear. A wombat. What he won't be expecting is a life sized skeleton complete with post-it annotations, all of which at least seem correctly placed.

Taking a deep breath he gathers himself, suddenly overwhelmed, suddenly in awe of what this is and what his friend is.

He truly never thought he had this much patience in him.

"Don't worry, Jimmy. You'll be fine."

"My nephew wasn't this much trouble when he was four and I had him for the weekend whilst his parents went to New Orleans."

"Oh, he's no trouble. I just snap my fingers and he does exactly what I tell him these days."

The eyes are sly. Upturned.

"Of course, that doesn't mean he'll do the same for you. In fact, the thing that Chase likes most about you is that he can wrap you around his little finger."

It's true. He can.

Everyone can.

The reason James Wilson is so loved is that he's putty in the hands of the world.

(*)

He goes downhill fast, the drugs raging war against the cells and bacteria inside a limb that should not be.

He'd be so much better off without it.

House shivers under thin sheets, his body fighting against itself with such fervour he feels it might even win. He tastes the metallic tang of blood on his tongue as he bites it as one might bite a bit. A rag in the mouth to stop the sound from escaping.

It's been thirty minutes since Wilson left and, in that time, it's all just escalated.

Poor Martha panders in the doorway, her feet pressed hard into the ground as she watches her mentor and slave driver succumbing to it all.

She'll be gone soon. In her strange, autistic little world, she feels as though she's reaching an end with this department.

"House?"

Through gritted teeth he asks her "What?"

He grips the sheets as a woman in labour might, white knuckled, gasping against the contractions of his spasming leg.

She halts for a second as she watches the spectacle, as she imagines a thousand tiny firearms shooting fast beneath House's skin. Taub told her he must be in agony and that, whilst pain is in the mind it overtakes House's mind entirely.

They can't give him heavy duty painkillers because of the Vicodin misuse so, whilst he's kept hazed he's not kept pain free as others might be.

He calls it the Tragedy of Addiction and his words hide a concern he would never voice, could never voice other than through sarcasm to deflect its depth.

The intern deflects nothing, doesn't have the human ability to hold back.

"What does it feel like?" she asks, because it's what _he_ might say, what he might enquire if the situations were reversed. "The pain, I mean. What kind of pain is it? Would you say it's like pins and needles or knives? Does it feel like pressure?"

Her lack of tact is down to her lack of awareness.

"I'm just curious."

She figures he'll appreciate this kind of distraction because it's the kind he'd offer himself. House can't criticise her for it because it's damn brave of her, childlike and naïve as it may be but he's not in the mood to give her what she needs.

He needs work. He needs something to take his mind off the burning, gnawing, clawing, debasing agony that he feels right now.

He wonders how long before he gives in and begs for induced coma.

He wonders how long before they realise it's too late for him.

She's supposed to be working on a patient, HIS patient, a thirty-six year old woman with what appears to be fungus growing internally and externally. It looks tropical. The growths, they're like nothing he's ever seen before.

Being locked up in this bed, half-delirious with pain, he won't see them again.

"Did you run the cultures?" he asks, his voice pressing through teeth that gate and imprison his words as they imprison his screams. "Or, do you want to stand there asking questions until I fire you?"

"Like I said, I was just curious."

"You know what curiosity did to that bad old puddy cat, don't you? And, you know what tardiness did to the pretty lady with mushrooms growing between her toes?"

She tilts her head, more canine than feline, and it's only when she sees the unrestrained rage and pain in his eyes that she moves away.

"I'll go see if there's anything back from the lab."

"You do that."

She nods her head, her long bangs casting a shadow over her strange, owlish eyes. House sees himself in that girl, the eccentric genius, the Aspergers oddity who'll go far if she can get past her own squareness. He deflects with wit and intellect. She hasn't exactly got the breasts or the comic timing to be of much use at all.

He likes her, though.

"I can see why you like him," she says of Chase, the man she barely knows, the man she'll never get close to as she might've done had he been healthy. "He'll never be cleverer than you are."

He could've been though, House thinks.

Now she's his closest match.

(*)

"This is Harold?" Wilson asks, as he lifts up that sculpted wrist and drops it just as quickly. "You always loved this thing. I remember the time you dressed it up as Santa Claus and left it in the hallway of the hospital."

"I did?" 

"Cuddy went ape when one of the kids from pediatrics cried herself hysterical because she didn't realise Santa had died. You were in her bad books for a long, long time after that one. Honestly, I didn't think you had it in you."

He almost asks if Chase remembers that, halts the words before they come out but for some reason Chase seems at ease

"Sounds vaguely familiar."

"You're funny after a couple of drinks. You let yourself go."

"Yeah?"

"Completely."

Wilson smiles. It's hard talking to Chase now. It's hard relating to him because of everything he goes through just to improve, just to get by.

It's hard watching a brilliant young doctor have to push himself into learning the names of bones on a model skeleton because it's the only thing that exercises his brain to such an extent that it heals it. It's working, though. His recent scans have shown vast improvement since he's been applying himself to all of this.

Wilson's proud of his efforts and he knows damn certain that House is.

He watches as Chase strokes the leg bones of the model, as his eyes take on a distant look that suggests he's trying to make sense of it.

"He'd fall over if I took the leg away," he says aloud, indicating where his thought processes are going.

"They won't take the leg unless they have to, Chase. That's a long way off yet."

"But what if they do?"

"Then, he'll deal. You'll deal. We'll all deal."

"He shouldn't have to just deal. I wish it was me in there, not him."

He means it.

As he continues to soothe that model leg he imagines he's soothing House's. In his own mind he is. He wishes he were.

He wishes he were taking the pain away.

"You just have to hold on, Chase. It's difficult when a close friend's in pain but…"

But it is what it is.

It's strange for Wilson to see, this care, this deep rooted need for House to be alright. This is the man who sold House out to Vogler to keep his job; the man whose own self preservation was such that he didn't, couldn't, see past his own needs.

It's strange to think that Chase would jump out of a moving vehicle for House; that he'd give up his own progress just so House could be well again.

He's almost sobered by what he's learned this past day, about House, about Chase, about two people he thought he knew well but clearly doesn't know at all.

"Come on," he says, as he pulls Chase away from the model and leads him further inside. "It's been a rough day for both of us. What do you say we order in some food try to make the best of it?"

The best of a bad situation.

Wilson can't help but fear that House's new direction might just have mapped out a lifetime of doing the very same. Of making the best.

He doesn't know whether it makes him respect him or pity him.

"Pizza, yeah? We always have pizza on a Thursday."

It's Tuesday, but Wilson doesn't bother to correct him. There's no need.

"Pizza it is, then."

It's strange when Chase reaches out for his arm unconsciously, grabs onto it gently but securely. Stranger still when he allows himself to be led to the couch as he tries his best to maintain balance.

That hand on Wilson's arm, it rests until they sit down.

Whether it's for comfort or balance he can't be sure.


	75. Chapter 89

_So, Wilson and Foreman have gone on a little Road Trip with Chase and House is not doing so well.I'm not strictly sticking to Canon as that's lost to me now. People come and go. People cross over. I'm just using characters that were in the show over the course of the last two seasons. It'll be canonically and factually wrong sometimes but it is what it is.  
_

_Just another day in the life, really. _

_Hope you all know that your feedback is kind of inspiring me. I might not be writing with any degree of goodness but it's giving me food for thought. So please carry on. If you can leave me a little note then please do xx  
_

_(*)_

The trip had been planned for months. It wasn't something that could be avoided. A conference. A talk. Wilson and Foreman were representatives of PPTH. Their speeches had been written, their names added to the agenda.

Thirteen was on the agenda too. She's gone now. She had her reasons. They might not make sense but they're reasons alone, reasons of a dying woman, of a butterfly whose wings won't flap for much longer.

It is what it is.

That Wilson was now 'babysitting' was seen as a negative at first with regard to the trip until it was decided that Chase would simply go along with him.

It was either that or an abrupt return to in-patient respite.

"That's not an option," House had said firmly. He'd spent the morning being scanned, prodded, injected and extracted from. Over the course of an hour he'd made Marsters cry, made Taub question his own masculinity and driven Cuddy to the bottle she hasn't touched in years.

She thinks he's delusional.

She also thinks he's heartbreakingly stubborn.

She thinks he needs to be assessed by the psych team; that he's somehow out of his mind.

All in all, it had been a successful day in Hell.

To hear Wilson even think of putting Chase away after agreeing to take him was just too much. Too much for him to even contemplate.

"He'll struggle enough with it at the end of the month. He's not spending two weekends under intensive psychiatric care. That's just too much. You commited to it, Wilson. You'll see it through even if you DO have to spend your night holding his hand whilst he babbles about red and black and too much money on number 17."

"So you'd rather him have a weekend of total sensory overload than a weekend in a calm, therapeutic environment?"

"He'll love the bright lights. Sure, they might make him fizzle out like C3PO but lets not kid ourselves. He'll have to experience it all sooner or later. Daddy can't keep him on a leash forever."

Wilson figures later would be the better option but he sees House's point. They can't wrap him in cotton wool for good. Sometimes, immersion is a good thing.

Still, the logistics are concerning.

"Can he even fly?" Wilson had asked, deeply concerned about the prospect of a pressurised cabin on Chase.

"If he can it'd be a damn miracle. He might look cherubic but he aint no Icarus, James."

"House…"

Foreman had concluded that the scans looked good. No swelling, no grey areas. Need for caution, yes, but not for total grounding.

"It's safe. He's safe. But is it really the kind of place you want to be taking him? He'll need to spend a few hours alone whilst we're speaking. Can he be trusted?"

"He does well with firm boundaries," House had explained. "Give him an agenda and he'll stick to it. Rigidly. To the minute. To the second. He's good like that. I've got him well trained. I beat it into him good.."

"I don't know. It just seems awfully risky."

The reluctance from Wilson had been understandable. Just one night alone with Chase had been complicated, though they'd got through it.

A weekend away with him? Surely he's not ready for that?

"It'll be fine. He'll be fine. It'll be comedy gold. Imagine it. Putting Chase on a casino floor and watching him try to figure out which way to turn. And besides, it didn't do Dustin Hoffman any harm. Our little Rain Man might net you a fortune."

Ah, the cruelty of sensory overload. Of autism.

Chase isn't autistic – but he does process strangely.

He's as close to Rain Man as any of them, in truth.

If the truth were out there, though, they all might understand. They might understand that House wanted Chase out of the way, blinded and distracted through the worst of it.

He doesn't want him to see this.

He doesn't want him around should it all get more serious than it already is. He's already watched his mother suffer. It's not fair for him to watch House suffer too.

(*)

The immature central nervous system of a child often leaves it open to over-stimulation, hyper-arousal and, in turn, mental anguish. Studies show that children born into bland environments struggle with patterned wallpaper; that babies who are raised in silence have little tolerance for loud noises and bright colours.

It takes a long, long time for their brains to be re-wired. To grow accustomed to the brashness and the loudness and the harshness of life.

This is a city that never sleeps. Everywhere you look there are colours. Sharp signals. There are flashing lights and there is noise, such noise coming from every direction. The whirl of a roulette table. The bleeping hum of the slots. The tacky jingle of a Winning Streak and the rousing gaggle of a thousand voices all blended into one. To some, this is the place of dreams. To others it's a nightmare, Hieronymous Bosch in physical, real life form.

"Does it have to be so loud?"

Every flash is a dagger to Chase's temple, every beep and groan and yell and shriek like a bullet to his lobes. He imagines a computer with ten different programmes running and it explains the sluggishness of Chase's movements, the confusion with which he attempts to ward off the onslaught.

He stumbles twice. Once, into a large Italian-American man who's clearly on a losing streak and ready to attack the first person that looks at him funny, then simply into the machine itself.

The man looks fit to burst. To burn.

"Are you drunk?"

"No, I – I – "

_I'm sorry, I really don't know what I'm doing. _

The man stops short of grabbing him. He just glares angrily. Gambling, and losing, has a detrimental effect on some people.

"Get out of here."

"I'm sorry."

Why did they think this was a good idea?

Foreman steps closer to his former colleague, places a hand on his arm as if to steady him. It's a long walk from check in to their room and it's all stragetic, the placement of machines designed to dredge every last cent out of a person as they make their way to and from their rooms. He'd looked panicked and cornered as he leaned against the marble counter whilst Wilson gave in their names because even here in the relative 'quiet' there is noise enough to drive a person crazy.

The floor itself is Hell on Earth.

"I know there's a lot to take in," the neurologist says, "but try to keep your focus."

Chase would reply but his head's too full.

"If it's too much just close your eyes. Remove one of the sensory fields. Take deep breaths. You can do this. You won't fall. I've got you."

Wilson should've known it'd be too much for Chase, that his processing is such that this much sight and sound and light and heat would be overkill for his short wired innards. As they move through those brimming slots, all of which emitting a different sodden mechanical jingle, Chase does as Foreman bids.

He closes his eyes, not wanting to take in the sights for fear of blinding himself. Again he stumbles. Foreman's got him this time, though.

"This place is overwhelming to people with normal neurological function," Eric concedes. "To him, this must feel like a sensory nightmare."

"He's probably just tired. It doesn't help."

"Lets just get him to the room. We'll take it from there."

They're all tired. A delayed flight and a three hour time difference causes disruption in anyone. Coupled with an hour-long wait for a taxi in the blazing heat it's no wonder he's losing it.

Wilson leans back, his face staring up at the ornate ceiling, and whispers "I could use a drink."

(*)

They're still walking. The casino itself is huge, the hotel huge and imposing. It towers over them. It looms. It excites. Over-excites.

"How big IS this place?"

Chase averts his eyes downwards but even the carpet is too much. They're designed to be painful on the eyes so as to keep guests looking upwards. The disorientating maze of the casino floor is enough to send anyone into the mental, lethal labyrinth of craziness. Those with their wits about them can handle the insanity. Those, like Chase, who lack something in their heads – they just struggle with it.

"Wilson – "

"Keep walking," Wilson warns him but as they pass through a louder, brighter corner of the maze, Chase seems to really struggle. The air is thick with smoke as people puff on cigars, on Marlboro, on anything to keep them focused.

"We're almost there."

Chase says nothing. He just keeps on walking.

It's only when they reach the elevator corridor that he begins to breathe again, only now that Wilson notices he's been trying his best not to.

"I don't do well with smoke," he whispers, and his voice is already a fraction of what it was. He looks exhausted just by the short jaunt, disassembled and defaced. "Makes it difficult to breathe."

He coughs a little. Delicate. Embarrassed. Such a little flower. Such a fragile little thing.

"I'll be fine in a minute."

How he hates to be looked upon with the pity Wilson is addressing him with now. Foreman has gone on ahead to ensure the rooms are what they asked for. He knows from experience that the hotels often get it wrong.

"Do you need to go outside? Do you need air?"

"I have an inhaler. It's in the suitcase."

Wilson wants to ask what it's doing there but chooses not to. He's given up trying to guess Chase's blind logic, his strange sense of order.

House told him it was a puzzle he'll never crack.

Wilson's starting to believe that.

(*)

They're on the twenty-second floor. Wilson asked for a room with a view. He's almost sorry he bothered now when Chase glances outside and winces at the lights, at the flashes, at the 'peep show' sign that glistens in the distance. He pulls closed those blackout curtains and sits in utter darkness.

It's the quiet he needs. The quiet and the stillness.

To achieve that in this city is virtually impossible.

"I'll just stay here for awhile," Chase whispers as he begins to drift in the quiet. "I'll be fine by myself if you want to go out."

"Maybe we could both do with some sleep."

"…s'up to you. You could see if Foreman wants to go out. I don't need you to stay with me."

_Yes you do. _

It's only recently Wilson has realised just how much supervision House has to give him.

"I'll just catch some sleep before dinner. Don't worry about it. It'll be better after some rest. It was driving _me _crazy out there too."

But, Wilson _does_ worry.

House had thought this might be fun for him. How wrong could he be?

(*)

The conference isn't until tomorrow morning. Wilson's told Chase to check out the fountains. They're peaceful. Quiet. Beautiful to watch. House has informed him that, with strict curfews and planned activities, Chase will be fine alone. It worries Wilson to think of that, having seen how he reacted to the actual casino floor, but the medic-alert bracelet he wears will see to it that he's safe should the unthinkable happen and the fountains are only a step outside.

He won't stray far.

Tonight they're just enjoying their free time. Wilson was right. Sleep did make things better. Easier. Things are no longer so loud, so blinding. They're tolerable, if not preferable. Wilson had lain awake for twenty-five minutes just listening to Chase's breathing, admittedly scratchy from the smoky floor. He'd have to keep an eye on that. There are so many variables with Robert now, so many little warning signs that were never there before. It could take months. Years. In truth he might never be the same, might forever live with the effects of his averted death hanging over him, kicking into his ribs and his chest and his lungs and his head like jack boots.

House is showing Chase a facsimile of life. It's up to Chase to enhance that.

It was when his breathing became clear that Wilson was able to rest. They had dinner reservations for 8. Foreman had booked them into a fine dining Japanese restaurant in one of the neighbouring hotels. Best in the state, or so he'd been told. As representatives of the hospital all meals were billable, only recreational expenditure coming from their own pockets.

Before they'd left, Wilson had asked Chase if there was anything he'd like to see, to which the young man had shrugged his shoulders before asking, quite solemnly, if he could jump from the top of the Stratosphere.

"It's meant to be amazing. I heard someone talking about it on the plane."

"Seriously?"

"I hear it makes you feel closer to God."

"Haven't you felt close enough? Practically waited in his corridor, didn't you?"

He'd smiled. He never quite touched Heaven. He never quite felt God's presence but he feels it now in every breath he takes.

He feels the miracle of life – and yes, he'd quite like to feel the miracle of Vegas. But, perhaps he'd been joking about the jump.

"House keeps telling me about your Jewish guilt. I wouldn't want to be responsible for that if the rope snapped and I spilled my guts on the pavement."

Wilson swears he hears House in Chase more and more every day, the sarcasm, the wit and the grating, pulsing humour spilling into the boy as if drip fed with it.

(*)

It doesn't help that he looks like a teenager.

When they ask how old Chase is he automatically looks guilty which immediately makes him look like he's doing something wrong. It puts them on the suspicious keel and they demand identification. Chase, in his thin t-shirt and knee length shorts, his back up crutches and his obvious drawling limp, looks nineteen if he's a day. His body language indicates a man so much younger than he is.

"I have my driving license," he says as he hands over the small card. It's virtually useless now but he figured he'd keep it anyway just as a reminder. As a tool, perhaps. Something to work towards.

"Ah, a baby face. Sorry, man. I had to ask."

"No problem."

He has a flash of a memory, of a patient asking to see his credentials because he 'couldn't possibly have graduated High School'. He gets the feeling this is a regular thing.

They tell him they can give him a wristband. It'll save him from having to show identification all the time. Before he has the chance to politely decline it's already wrapped around his left arm, bright blue and virtually impossible to remove with its wax strip and its well-hard glue.

It marks him.

It reminds him of the bracelet he wore for so long as a patient of his own hospital and, in turn, it itches. It grates on him.

Just four minutes into Chase's second attempt at the Floor of Fun and already he wants to leave.

(*)

He still winces when the noise becomes too loud, when the lights become too bright but his tinted glasses are helping immensely.

So is the lady he's been talking to for the past 20 minutes.

She's nice, this girl. Real nice. She's interested in what he says and she doesn't seem to mind when he loses track, which he does at great regularity. It's okay sweetie, take your time. It's alright, darlin', you just find your words.

They've been talking for ten minutes, now. Wilson told him to stay put whilst he went to find Foreman. The other man's got the hospital debit card and he needs to withdraw some cash. Chase had obediently done as he was told, idly putting a twenty dollar bill into one of the bar-top Jacks or Better machines because he's not good at much but he's good at that. He's been learning cards with Foreman. This game, in particular, is one which requires little memory and little stragetic thought.

All he needs to do is look for the patterns that are clearly marked out in front of him.

She gave him tips. With her help, he was up to $48 and just about on top of the world. Her name is Chanelle and she tells him she's from Texas. If he were listening closely he'd be able to tell that her accent's fake, as well as her breasts.

When Wilson returns he introduces her eagerly.

"Hey."

"I wasn't gone too long, was I?"

Knowing Chase's preoccupation with time he'd been expecting him to panic. Clearly, he's been distracted.

"I've been busy."

Busy indeed.

"Chase," Wilson whispers in the young man's ear. "You do realise she's a prostitute?"

"A…a what?"

He heard. He just didn't process.

She did.

"And, she was just leaving, weren't you…what's your name? Brandy? Candy?"

"Chanelle. And yes, I'm leaving."

She puts her varnished hand on Chase's shoulder.

"It was nice to meet you, Robert."

She backs off. Wilson had heard her telling her friend that Chase seemed like 'easy money'. She called him a pretty piece of ass with a few screws loose. Not too bright. He'd pay a fortune, she said, and she'd already scoped out his wallet so that'd earn her a few extra pennies.

It's upsetting to hear of him being spoken of in such unflattering, vulnerable terms but Chase seems oblivious to it, thankfully enough. He just looks confused.

"We were just talking about movies," he says. "And school. She asked me where I grew up. What I was doing in Vegas. She seemed nice. And pretty."

"She's had the same conversation with three people since we've been sitting here, Chase. She moved onto you when she realised the other two were locals. Trust me, I know a prostitute when I see one."

"Oh."

It's not that he looks dejected because he was third choice. He's dejected that _he_ didn't know.

"I honestly didn't realise."

"When there's an attractive girl at a bar on her own in this place it's pretty much nailed on."

He looks around as if to prove a point.

"That girl there on the end in the pink dress. Blonde hair. She's a prostitute. Notice the way she's pretending to drink but isn't letting any of it pass her lips? She'll nurse that drink until a potential client comes along. Then she'll finish it off and have him buy her another one."

A wry smile passes Chase's lips as he says "You'd know, loverboy. Is that how you've experienced it?"

It's not even his voice. For a moment Wilson has to doubletake.

It's just uncanny.

"And, again, it's as if House is sitting here next to me. I can't escape him, can I?"

Because if anything ever did happen to House he'd be here, living and breathing and talking and _limping_ in his protégé.

"Just saying. You know an awful lot about prostitutes."

"Yeah. I've had to, knowing House. I've had to learn how to spot them when they're leaving the hospital so I can cover up any messes he might've left behind."

"He brings prostitutes to work?"

"Sorry, massage therapists."

Chase smiles.

"Explains why Sinitta put so much breathing into it when she got to work on my leg."

"Sinitta? God, tell me you're not serious."

The boy laughs. It's nice to see him at ease. He sips his diet coke as if it's got whiskey in it. It's almost like he's pretending so as to fit in. He's a boy pretending to be a man. He's even stolen a stirrer from behind the bar just to make it look legit.

It's something a fifteen year old would do.

"I'm kidding. My massage therapists are generally middle aged men. I hope they don't get a kick out of it."

They both laugh now. Wilson laughs because this is the Chase he remembers. Quietly confident. Funny, when the mood took him.

He's got a long way to go – but he'll get there.

"It's good that you're getting out, Chase. Putting him to the back of your mind. He'll be okay. You don't have to spend all of your time worrying about him. He wouldn't want that."

"I know."

He knows.

He knows because he's texted him three times since he's been here and each and every time, House has responded with an affirmative. He's good. He's fine. He's got candy stripers fawning all over him and he doesn't even have to pay for it.

Chase needs that reassurance that everything's okay. That House is still living. Breathing. .

He gets the feeling House needs it of him, too, even if he doesn't want it.

For House, those little messages, poorly spelt, poorly typed and hastily sent, are the highlight of his day. He's spent most of it sleeping. His fever is lingering at a steady 101 and he's being kept 'quiet' for the most part. The feeling in his foot is improving but the infection, whilst responding slowly, is still raging inside of him. There's no holding on. The clot is thinning but not moving. There's nothing that can be done but what is being done now, other than the ultimate.

He's holding off on the ultimate and even as he lies her, ever the good patient when he has to be, it's with a sense of determination that it WON'T come to that.

He knows it's bad when he wakes up with Cuddy holding his hand, knows it's serious when she starts asking him if it's just time to 'give it up'.

He knows he's falling when he begins to agree with her.

"One more day," she had said. "If there's no improvement after the next IV's gone through we need to start looking at options."

It's because of Chase that House agrees, though the determination is still there.

It's because he's got something grounding him in life, now, that he agrees that to lose a leg is better than to lose a life.

That he doesn't fight back with snarky comments worries her, he knows that, but even she can't deny the smile she sees on his face when that Yoda tells him that a "message from the darkside, there is".

"4man is a dag", it says, "u should c his shit."

He means shirt.

That one little mistake means the entire world of amusement for House. He laughs despite the pain. He smiles regardless of the tough choice he has coming to him, the choice that Chase is not aware of, the choice that might mean so much for the both of them.

The next one is more direct. More thoughtful. More meaningful.

"Hpe ur ok."

He just imagines those clumsy fingers trying to type that out in the middle of a bar that's far, far too old for him.

It's as enchanting as it is heartbreaking.

"I'm good," he replies.

He leaves it at that.

He doesn't want to lie too much.

(*)

It moves fast. It moves through him like a breath. The pain. Like a breath and a sigh and a scream and a holler.

By 11pm, House is close to screaming as the pressure builds, as the bone cracks under the pressure.

"House, you HAVE to listen to me."

It's Taub's voice, thick and clear and desperate, really desperate.

"Not listening. Not until morning."

"But the clot. The swelling…"

"…is breaking up, little man. This? This is just a love tap. Trust me, I'm a doctor."

"The pain…"

"…is manageable. Now, be a good little man and hand me the phone, would you? And you might want to leave the room before I aim it at your ugly little head."

The ONLY thing that's keeping him going is the fact that his white count is improving.

He's lucid enough to know that his life isn't in danger. Yet. He can hold off for a little while longer.

Still, it doesn't stop him from grabbing that cellphone and desperately, desperately typing a message with trembling fingers to the only person on Earth who matters to him with any degree of certainty.

It says but one word.

"Goodnight."

There's no reason for the word. There's no deeper meaning. It just felt important.

It's important that he says that one word before he succumbs; before he passes out from the agony of the hairline fracture that throbs and burns. Thirteen once told him that, if it came to be that she were dying, her last words would not be deep, would not be meaningful. They probably wouldn't even be memorable.

"They'd just be what I wanted to say."

She's gone now. He understands why she left, why she vanished without a trace. He understands why she had to leave this all behind.

Nobody else does.

"I'll just slip away quietly. Nobody will even notice me gone."

He understands that if it came to be that she were unable to live any longer she'd want to go quietly.

He'll do the same.

"I'm not dying," he whispers under his breath but in some ways it _feels_ like he is. "This is just…precaution."

They won't touch him whilst he sleeps unless it becomes critical.

He hopes he has a good night; that he turns a corner as he sleeps.

He hopes that, whilst Chase wins big under the bright lights of Vegas, he wins bigger under the dim stars that hover outside of his hospital room.

He just hopes.


	76. Chapter 90

_Another Chapter. Thank you again for all of your wonderful reviews and PMs. It really does help me to write quicker to know that people are still out there. I get little surges of inspiration if I've received a PM or a review. It sounds ridiculous but encouragement always does help._

_I must apologise for my spellcheck. It doesn't seem to spell the poor intern's name right, giving her an 'r' where an 'r' is not required. Thank you Knittywoman for drawing my attention to it._

_There are an awful lot of people who want poor Chase to be half dead. Sadists _

_So, here we have another little chapter. I do hope it's not a total disappointment._

_Those I owe a PM to I will get to it. Promise. I wrote this on my iPhone at a 2 hour break yesterday so not really on the computer much until this evening. I shall be here then. _

_Please continue to encourage if you can find the time. Like I said, it really does help. _

_(*)_

It must be strange waking up one day and the tiny nuances of human behaviour are no longer in your grasp.

Wilson watches Chase struggle with social interaction whilst Foreman excels at it, two men of a not too dissimilar age who are so far removed from each other they might not be speaking the same language.

Wilson; thoughtful, awkward Wilson, walks somewhere in between the two.

The bar is a familiar place because, though they'd never admit it, they all crave familiarity. Its inside the hotel thats done out like a miniature Manhattan, its dwarf Statue of Liberty a Disney-esque centrepiece. It's like an old NY piano bar, the kind that Wilson used to frequent with House many moons ago when they were young men together. It feels like yesterday, Wilson thinks, as he sips his cold beer and wonders where the decades went.

For his younger companion, the decades just got buried, same as he did.

Its thematic. Two grand wood instruments duel against one another implying a fight yet existing and performing in perfect harmony with each other. As the the crowd gathers the 'fight' becomes more enthusiastic. The musicians take requests. Johnny B Goode is a popular one, it seems, as it's been played twice since they've been sat at the bar.

A steady stream of tourists come in, some wearing T Shirts in the name of Guinness, of Nine Fine Irishmen.

It's a warm, homely feel and it's just what they needed.

There's a flash. A little jarred memory deep in Wilson's epicentre of a newly freed up Chase staring in disbelief as his two friends made him aware of what should've been obvious: the fact that he was a prince. That he was a handsome bastard. That he was enviable in his value to the opposite sex.

That seems like yesterday, too

"I'm not THAT good looking" he'd said with a disbelieving frown which, in turn, only served to make him look brooding and yet more attractive. He was then. He still is now with his fair hair growing thicker, his scarred head hidden under that stylish hat, a gift from Thirteen before she left. House had described as his 'Abercrombie Helmet' and Chase looks every bit the underwear model he always looked only thinner now. More delicate. 'Prettier', even. Younger. His face has sharper edges now, prevalent cheekbones and a strong, masculine jaw.

He doesn't even have to try.

Wilson had envied that beautiful face and those bright, bright eyes back then. Back before. It just seems wasted now as women (and if he's brutally honest, men too) look to Chase for attention or affirmation yet receive entirely nothing in return. He's oblivious to cues. His ego, whilst never inflated, is now barely existent.

It makes him stand out all the more.

"I think she likes you" Wilson says of the pretty Hispanic bartender whose smile has been Chase's for the past half hour. He's caught her staring at him a dozen times. The fact that the object of her affections doesn't notice seems to make him more appealing.

"Who, me?" Chase asks, surprised. "Nah."

"Well I doubt very much she's smiling at me."

"Maybe she's just smiling. Did you ever think of that?"

Still, he's curious. Finally, after a lifetime of ignoring her existence, Robert glances in her direction.

Her blush would light up the sky at night.

"She's not really my type."

His 'type' has always been bookish and arty. Intelligent. Wholesome. Or, in later years, dominant. House used to insist that Chase was into S & M. He claimed to have a confession from the boy himself. Wilson tries to imagine Chase struggling with a dominant woman as she clawed at him and tore at his clothes, ripping away second skin. It seems abusive rather than sexual now. Chase, tied to a bed, would only be because he was seizing. Because he wasn't himself.

The thought of Chase being with a woman screams of advantages being taken.

He's even more naive than before now.

"Anyway, Foreman's in" Chase smiles, as the older man leans into a woman's personal space with a welcoming grin. She looks middle aged but fiercely attractive. The way she stirs her cocktail screams sexual tension. "Is she a prostitute too?"

Wilson laughs. She's still wearing her name badge from whatever conference she attended today. That indicated pride or simple lack of diligence.

"I wouldn't say so."

"How does he do it?"

"He's surprisingly adept with the opposite sex, I have to say. Even dressed like that."

"And you?"

"Probably as unlucky as you are. Except...I don't look like you so I shouldn't really be surprised."

Wilson is handsome in a 'safe' kind of way but women have always just seen him as a friend. Chase, though...

"What was it Elise in the NICU said? You're a catch. Best looking doctor since Clooney."

It's like the world has tilted. History repeats itself in a few short words only altered. Altered, as he is.

"Oh come on," Chase says. "I think if girls were kissing frogs they'd hope for them to turn into something better than me. I'm not that good looking."

"You kind of are."

A look crosses those vivid eyes at the same time it crosses Wilson's.

It's something like recognition.

The colour of De Ja Vu.

(*)

When he falls asleep in the corner it raises a smile.

"I think your buddy's had too much," that pretty barmaid says as she eyes him with the same expression a child eyes ice cream.

She should know he hasn't had any at all.

He's just crashed, crashed with such rapid decline that Foreman will be diagnosing narcolepsy any second now, in semi serious jest. There had been concerns with how much sleep Robert still needed, sometimes clocking up to 16 hours a day but this is just a culmination of flight, overstimulation and double dose medication to warn off the impending doom that Wilson had heard crackling in his lungs.

He's brought out his inhaler but he seemed to be fighting the urge to use it.

"Kids, eh? They don't know when they've had enough."

The bracelet indicates this 'kid's a legal adult but he could be so much less. Wilson feels a pang. Protective. Paternal. Poor Chase, so young and pitiful. It's almost sad. It's almost sad that he can't keep up. That he brings out these feelings in people where his pride would make him resent that.

He wonders if this is how House feels.

"We should head back," Foreman says as he finay makes his presence known.

"What about your woman? She looked keen."

"Wilson, contrary to popular belief it is possible to have a conversation with a woman without it being foreplay."

"Right. Thank you, Foreman, for that lesson in human interaction. I'll be sure to take that on board."

"We're here for work, first and foremost. She was just...interesting. She had a lot to say."

"And I expect talking into a woman's breasts is quite enough excitement for one night, right?"

"We were just talking."

Foreman looks at Chase pretty much passes out beside Wilson and it makes him smile. It's not the first time he's seen him in that state only last time it WAS alcohol induced.

"He should be in bed."

"I know."

A gentle nudge from Foreman brings him back to life, albeit fuzzily. His glasses have fallen down and he can barely make out anything at all.

"We're leaving. It's 6am."

"6?"

Foreman smiles.

"I'm kidding. But it's late."

For a second he doesn't know where he is. The sight and unfamiliar smells startle him.

Then he remembers. Relaxes.

As they're leaving, he's patted on the back and labelled 'Charlie Sheen'. Such a recent pop culture comment is lost on a man who in some ways feels trapped at the turn of the century. He turns and smiles, his eyes bewildered and tired, his face a picture of good-natured confusion.

"Charlie Sheen" he says once. Tries out the name for size.

He feels jittery and disorientated but he doesn't want to make it too obvious. It's often the case when he first awakens after a power-nap that his surroundings don't make much sense to him.

This place is an oubliette, if ever there was one, and the people who inhabit it make precious little sense too.

"Charlie Sheen?" he asks, this time more of a question.

"Don't worry about it, Chase," Foreman replies, "I'm too tired to explain it now."

It's an understandable comparison to make. Slumped in the corner he'd looked wasted. Totally out of the stratosphere. The tired red rings of his eyes tell the tale of a party boy from the other side of the globe who has downed so many shots he can barely stand.

If only that's what it was.

If only it were that simple. That 'innocent'.

"Lets get you back to the room. Get some rest. For all of us."

"But I was having a good time. Weren't you? Didn't Foreman have a prostitute to entertain?"

He tries to smile. To look cheeky. He just ends up looking frazzled.

"He's going back alone, Chase. You and me are going back alone too. We have work in the morning."

"But it's not late."

He sounds like the little brother that's trying so hard to keep up with the big boys. It's endearing. It's ridiculous.

"You crashed and burned a half hour ago, Chase. It's late enough."

"I did not burn and crash."

He jumbles the words. It still makes sense.

"I was still listening. I just had my eyes closed. Foreman told me to do that if I started getting hyped up or things got too loud. I wasn't sleeping."

"Yeah. Right."

"I _wasn't._ I swear to God. I'm not _that _much of a lightweight."

He knows that he is. He just doesn't want to give up yet. He'd been enjoying the music. It reminded him of the tunes House plays in the evening when he's decompressing after work. Jazz piano, perfect in key. Something to just relax to. One of the pianists even looked like him only that designer stubble was red in hue and he looked a little younger than the man himself.

Away from the blinding lights and the pulsing, throbbing visual assaults, Chase is enjoying the change in scene. He doesn't want to give it up just yet even if he knows he should.

"Look," Wilson says, and he tries to make it about him, now. "Foreman's already gone on ahead. We've got an early start in the morning. You look like you're going to fall down any second."

"Alright."

"Okay?"

Reluctantly, Chase agrees. If he was honest he'd come clean about how his chest is feeling tight again and it's beginning to be a struggle to take in air. It's partly why he'd fallen asleep, that lack of true oxygen making him light headed and tired beyond reason.

He's not stupid. He knows when he should stop even if he wishes he didn't have to.

He just wanted to see how far he could push it.

"You'll have plenty of time tomorrow to just enjoy your time here. It's not all bright and loud."

"I guess."

He's just glad they had that time; that he'd been able to prove himself capable of independence from House even if only for a night.

(*)

When he gets back the first thing he does is check his phone. He'd been low on reception in the bar and nothing had come through. Now that he sees the text from House it makes him smile. He squints his eyes behind his glasses to try to make out the word.

"Goodnight."

He sees it was sent two hours ago and figures it's best to let him sleep. To heal. He'll call him in the morning just to let him know he was thinking about him but he knows himself when he's not feeling good the last thing he needs is being woken up for something pointless like to be asked who the president of the United States is or what damn year it is.

He always wondered what the need for neuro checks were when wasn't it medically proven that sleep heals all?

The message Wilson received was not quite so static, more malignant than benign. He dials through to his voicemail and is stunned to silence when he hears his best friend's voice shuddering in agony he cannot even struggle to hide.

He feels sick to his stomach when he hears House's words; when he hears the fear in his voice and knows he's suffering that alone.

"I think they're going to take a hacksaw to me, Jimmy. Don't cry, now. It was only a matter of time. I've limped one last time, I think."

There's a laugh at the end. It's more a grimace. A choke. Invisible hands are choking the life from that limb and it's all very much audible in that strained voice.

"Standing upright's overrated. I hear bionic limbs are the way forward. God only knows why I got so attached to the useless thing when I could re-enact Robocop. I always loved that movie."

It's all jovial until it isn't.

House tells Wilson not to let anything happen to Chase, not to let them stunt him so much that he regresses entirely 'should anything happen'. The boy's doing good, he says, every inch the proud parent as he ponders his achievements.

It's almost as if he's handing over the reins.

"Just make it easy for him. This is just going to thrust him into outer space."

His insecure attachment is such that he'll assume the worst. He'll assume that House, unable to take care of himself, will be done with him.

He won't feel 'trusted' enough to share the burden.

Wilson looks towards Chase as he flicks through the TV channels in search of something watchable. Awake, now. Bright eyed. He's oblivious. He knows nothing.

It's so much better to keep it that way.

When Chase settles on a channel playing classical music he's thankful the young man hasn't developed House's taste in music, at least. That soothing viola and double bass is preferable to the grating metal guitar that House would have had them listening to had he been the one in control.

"I just need to make a couple of phone calls," Wilson explains. "I won't be long."

He closes the door to the bathroom and sits on the marble tub. In here there is privacy. In here, Robert cannot hear him.

He does the only thing he can do. He calls the only person who can give him an answer.

That Cuddy's still at the hospital is testimony to just how serious things have become.

"Wilson."

"Lisa, House left me a message. He sounded pretty messed up. How bad is it?"

The slight pause is damning, the pitch of her voice, terrifying.

"I don't know how much longer we can hold off."

"Just…do what you have to do. He knows how serious this is. Things are different now."

They've been here before only this time, House isn't comatose. He's not snowed. He's not medically rendered helpless and lifeless and thoughtless and incapable.

This time he's fighting.

"Wilson, he'll never forgive me."

"Has he given permission?"

"As a last resort."

"And, are we there yet?"

What can Cuddy say? Her head says there's still a chance. Her heart, her heart just breaks for the man who has suffered so long and so hard, the man who hates the world because of what it has done to him.

She can't imagine him going from the pain he's in now to the phantom pain of a long-dead limb.

It's unthinkable.

"We're not there yet but…we're close. He's stable at the minute but I don't know how long that's going to last."

It's hard for Wilson to know that House is suffering alone. It's hard to know that he's there in that sterile bed wishing and hoping and praying to a God he doesn't believe in and who might not even listen.

House has pissed off God by acting on his behalf and Wilson can only imagine the debt he has with the Almighty.

He leans his head against the tile.

It's coldness grounds him, somehow.

"Give him every chance possible, Cuddy. I don't need to tell you that."

"I'm doing everything I can."

Yet still he's alone. Still he's languishing in careless silence, his best friend gone, his young, hopeful distraction absent too.

Everyone that House cares about is gone from sight.

"Just…do one thing for me, Lisa. Don't let him be alone. He'll push you away with everything that's in him but he won't want to be alone."

Cuddy doesn't cry. She doesn't let those tears roll down her face because she is stoic and she is brave and she is professional.

But she's only human.

Her voice cracks, ever so slightly, when she tells Wilson she'll stay as long as is necessary.

(*)

"Who were you talking to?"

Chase is sitting up, the hotel notepaper sprawled out on his bed, the Bellagio printed biro in his hand. He's drawn a replica of Harold on the page in front of him but, to Wilson, it looks more like a wax melted scarecrow.

He's scrawled all over the page. By the looks of his face he's wide awake.

Wilson lies because he doesn't want to alarm Chase. He holds back because he's relaxed and he's calm and he's coping well without House.

"I was just making sure the apartment was safe. I've got a friend looking after it. There have been a few break ins the last few weeks."

"Why do people do that?"

"Break into apartments? I don't know, Chase. Why do people do a lot of things?"

"Ours is like Fort Knox since Christmas. House kept threatening to buy a shotgun but he was scared I'd have an episode and blow my own penis off."

Spoken with such juvenile amusement.

"Well, we wouldn't want that."

Wilson knows about the locks. He's noticed the bolts, top and bottom. What Chase doesn't realise is that it's partly to keep him in rather than just to keep people out. The last time he went walking it all just went so badly wrong.

He tries not to imagine the need to move to a place with better access, doesn't want to imagine House asking Cuddy for ramp access to the diagnostics department so that he can get his wheelchair in.

The passing image stabs him harder than any knife could.

Chase doesn't notice the tension. He doesn't notice the unease that's pulsing off Wilson's body in waves. Instead he just goes back to his notes, his words, his labels, tiny arrows drawn from every inch of that badly drawn figure with the names of the bones done in fine block capitals. Half of them are wrong. Some don't even remotely resemble words.

To Chase's brain they're all perfectly formed. Those letters truly do spell out the things he wishes for them to say. It'll take a long, long time for him to re-wire himself to the point where he sees things correctly.

"Don't stay up too late, okay Chase?"

"Just one hour, James."

"Did you brush your teeth? Take your pills?"

Spoken like a true father.

"Done and done. Contrary to popular belief I am capable of _some_ things."

"So I've noticed. You've come a long way."

"Miles and miles."

He _is_ capable. He's capable of wit. He's capable of logical thought. He's capable of conversation with strangers. He's capable of making others laugh, making others smile, making women at bars wonder why on Earth they married their husbands when people like him exist in the world.

He's also capable of making Wilson feel like a breath of fresh air has finally swept through because his straightforwardness is more refreshing than his stoic secrecy was all the years he's known him.

"It's not good for you to be up until dawn. You have to be focused tomorrow. You've got some stuff to remember."

"I'll remember if you write it all down."

It's hardly remembering but there is a lot to get through. Where to be. Where not to be. When to come back. What to do in times of distress.

Stranger Danger…

Foreman's drawn everything out on a map that Chase swears he understands but only time will tell whether he actually does or not.

It'll all be better if he's well rested.

"Set an alarm. House said you need visual and auditory signals otherwise you lose track.."

"Oh, he said that?"

"He said you know how to do it yourself."

Without further instruction, Chase confidently goes to the home screen of his iPhone and sets the reminder as he's bid. The memory is there. The sequence is ingrained in his head: learned, imprinted.

He can do so many things he couldn't do last week. There are some things he's also forgotten but he's trying to think positive. He's always tried to think positive, even when he's panicking.

"Do you need me to set one for the morning as well? I can do two at once."

Wilson stares at him, though his lips are partway upturned. A ghost of a smile. A hint of amusement.

"Now you're just showing off."

Chase grins, beaming and beautiful.

The slight glint in his eye indicates that this might well be true.

"Goodnight, then."

"Goodnight, Chase."

It's better he doesn't know about House until it's inevitable. Wilson knows that the older man would be adamant about that. Why worry him? Why concern him until it's absolutely necessary?

He can almost hear that voice in the back of his mind.

"_Let him worry about learning to cross the road before he starts worrying about whether he'll be having to push my wheelchair across it."_

As Wilson closes his eyes he understands that he'll find it very, very difficult to sleep tonight.

He might not be rested either.

(*)

It all seems better now.

She places a hand on his forehead expecting to feel the burn. Instead he feels cool. Clammy.

His temperature is down to 98, fever broken, critical danger averted.

The pulse in his leg is better. More solid. The heat of the skin is less, the blood red tissue dimming to a quieter shade.

His breathing, which had been quick and staccato in reaction to pain, is now calm.

At 2.30am, just a few hours short of the begrudgingly agreed deadline, House turns a corner that so many felt him incapable of turning and that damaged, brutalised leg of his might well live to limp another day.

To Cuddy, that feels…bittersweet. Wonderful, yet horrific at once.

It's caused her to evaluate. Now, she's treading quicksand and it's only a matter of time before the suck and pull of Gregory House sends her way in over her head.

They say that true feelings often push themselves through the barriers of denial when a person comes close to losing another. Years of faux hatred can suddenly dissipate once a danger is averted.

As the tides pass and Cuddy realises that the thorn in her very side is NOT going to drown after all it's as if her floodgates have opened.

It's painful. It stuns her. It takes her breath away, this feeling, this emotion, this hatefully ill timed acknowledgement of something she's long, long tried to bury.

How she loves this man.

How she loves this man in all his perfections and imperfections and idiosyncrasies and more.

She puts her head in her hands and she sobs.

"Damn you, House," she whispers, through tears that are as anguished as they are happy. "Damn you, you maddening son of a bitch."


	77. Chapter 91

_A tiny update for dear Farrah Callen. It's not much but it's all I had time for. Didn't want to let you down before you went to hospital._

_Hope you're feeling better soon and there'll be a more substantial update for you when you return._

_And for the new people who have kindly left me notes and words of encouragement, I thank you very much. I'm feeling very inspired at the minute. For the next three weeks I suspect I'll be like this, if you all wish to stick with me. After that it might be a bit more sporadic but I promise not to leave it a year again xxx_

_(*)_

Awareness comes in waves. In slivers. It comes in dainty hands fingering around for purchase without grasping and often that awareness just slips away. Defeated, House tries again to battle through the thick layers that have been bundled all around him so that he can at least open his eyes.

Twice, thrice, he gives up, allows himself to be taken back down. Logic deems him not ready to awaken yet and so he does not fight too hard. His mind tells him 'rest, now' and for once in his life he abides.

At 8am the restraints of exhaustion cast themselves aside and House awakens with a jolt and a start. He chokes back into life where yesterday he had merely chugged lethargically and the first thing he does when he reaches awareness is scramble beneath the sheets.

Hands meet flesh. Fingers press down upon bone, desperate, frantic. That leg is an abomination but it's _his_ leg. It's the source of ungodly pain but it's _his_ pain.

A voice in his ear tells him "It's still there, House. Go back to sleep."

It doesn't occur to him to look up. To check. To see whose voice is offering him those words of reason and comfort and reassurance.

"Just rest."

He hadn't felt tired. For that one split second he had been fully awake, fully alert, ready to face the day.

The voice and the touch seem like permission.

"It's not going anywhere."

He closes his eyes, safe in the knowledge that nothing has been taken from him. That nothing has changed.

(*)

"I should call House," Chase says, as he awkwardly pulls on a t-shirt. This one has no buttons. Still, he struggles. It's a challenge for him to get past that elbow and that shoulder whose limited movement still in inhibits him.

He's glad that Wilson is facing away, cannot see his efforts.

"You can call later."

"I promised."

Wilson faces the wall. The expression on his face cannot be seen or deciphered. He looks down momentarily as he tries to dream up an excuse. Honesty won't do it. He doesn't want to alarm Chase before a period of time spent alone. He doesn't want to lie to him either but what choice does he have?

"Cuddy sent a text this morning," he says, those mistruths bitter on his tongue, "when you were sleeping."

"She did?"

"Yeah. She said he was booked in for some tests this morning. He won't be in his room until this afternoon."

"But he told me to call."

"Things happen, like I explained to you the other day. Sometimes people can't be where they say they're going to be. Remember? We talked about this."

Chase doesn't remember Wilson explaining that at all. He barely remembers his panic in that hospital corridor believing that once again he'd been left behind. Again, mitigating factors are difficult for Chase to understand. Changes in circumstances do not sit right in his damaged brain.

House had said to call and to go against that would seem like purposeful disobedience.

"You can call but you'd only get through to his messaging service and I know how you hate that woman's voice."

"So patron."

Patronising, he means, but he forgets the word half way through. It doesn't faze him. He just carries on as normal. He's getting good at that, Wilson has noticed, just carrying on as normal. Before, he'd have known something had been wrong. He'd have panicked. He'd have got frustrated and upset with himself for not being able to finish.

Now he just accepts it.

Chase goes through the sequence aloud. That way he gets it right. Underwear. Pants. T-shirt. Socks. He still has trouble putting on his socks, though his shoes slip on with ease. His co-ordination isn't fantastic when it comes to that particular activity and his range of movement between arm and leg is pretty much a hindrance to him.

It's his eyes that ask for help.

Wilson, it seems, suffers more for this than Chase does, pitying that independent young man who he once knew being reduced to this. He's coping, though. That's important. He's getting by.

"Do you think we'd know if something had happened? I think we would. Cuddy would've called, wouldn't she? She said she would."

Promised, in fact. She'd taken his hands in her own and vowed that, should the worst come to the worst, he'd be the first to know because she knows how important House is to him. Chase doesn't realise that was a barefaced lie designed to satisfy him. That the whole unit, it seems, are vying to protect him.

"She'd have called," Wilson replies. Affirms.

It's hard keeping things from him. House had told him to value honesty to an extent but assess what he thought Chase could handle. This isn't one of those things. The fact that she hasn't called yet this morning, to Wilson, is a positive thing. That's what he tells Chase, though it's with bittersweetness that he utters those words.

"No news is good news, right?" the younger man says. "That's what my Mum always used to say."

"Right."

"Except for people who bottle things up. For them, no news is bad news because they wouldn't say anything anyway."

Wilson smiles at that.

"You were always one of those people so you'd know. Your logic is getting better, at least."

"House says it's nothing. That I just learned how to state the obvious."

"Well, sometimes he downplays things."

"Emmett reckons I should take his negativity with a pinch of sugar."

_Salt._

"But then, he's an arse so why would I listen to anything he says?"

"Dr Emmett's good at what he does. I wouldn't have recommended him if he wasn't."

"He creeps me out."

"Because he's old?"

"Because _all _shrinks creep me out. What's the point in trying to get inside my head? It's a mess. I don't even know what's knocking around in there. Why would anyone else want to?"

Chase can be dim sometimes. That's nothing to do with his injuries either. Chase could always be dim when it came to important things like himself. He couldn't see the woods for the trees, the beach for the sand.

He couldn't see the man for the minion.

"Look, Chase, It's important for you to be able to express yourself. You might need someone to help you with that."

"I express myself just fine. House even says I'm over-emotional sometimes."

That's because he can't regulate. He can't moderate.

"Your brain's had to re-write itself pretty substantially and it's understandable if thought processes and emotional issues come to light. I've had to see Emmett a few times myself after I've lost patients. Sometimes…we just need someone to talk to."

"You said I need someone to help me with that. Someone to talk to. I've got House for that."

Those words alone prove, indeed, how much Chase needs a psychologist. A psychiatrist. Whatever other head doctor can try to knock some sense back into him.

But, Wilson has to concede, here, that House is doing something right. Look at the improvement. Look at the actual bond and trust and _care_ between them.

He hadn't even realised.

Wilson finishes helping Chase dress and looks up at him. There's something in his eyes that Chase doesn't recognise from House and from his brand of caring.

There's something pleading. Something that's desperate to get through.

Just listen, he's saying. Please, just understand that I'm trying to help you.

"You should listen to what people tell you, Chase. They're not saying it to be facetious. They're saying it because they know what's best for you."

A door opens, a door to that unregulated emotion he was speaking of.

The words roll of his tongue like saltwater.

"_Everyone_ knows what's best for me. I'm beginning to learn that. My dad knew what was best for me when he tried to ship me off to boarding school. My mum knew what was best when she'd lock me in my room so I didn't see her staggering all over the living room floor. Christ, even my _grandmother_ knew what was best for me when she tried to take them to court to get custody of me when I was a little kid."

That probably would've been best, Wilson thinks.

That probably would've made a difference.

"I think I've had that drummed into me on repeat for so long that I've had my brain _washed_, never mind scrambled. And that was long _before_ the accident."

"Chase, nobody is trying to take control away from you. You just need a little help right now."

"Yeah."

There's a hint of resentment in his voice, a slight tone of "I don't need anyone's help."

Then he contradicts himself by brushing it off and asking rather politely for Foreman's map and Wilson's hand-drawn itinerary because he knows full well he wouldn't manage without it.

Chase doesn't see the irony. He doesn't see how his actions and his needs speak so much louder than his assertions that he's perfectly okay.

He thanks Wilson kindly, folding that map up as neatly as he can and placing it in his back pocket. By the turn of the hour he'll panic, forgetting where he's put it, and it'll only be when he sits down to gather his mind that he'll feel it pressing against him.

"It's not a bad thing to need help, Chase," Wilson tells him, though he wonders if his wears will fall on purposefully deaf ears this morning.

Chase simply smiles that bittersweet smile that almost, almost reaches his eyes and sighs.

"Good job, really, isn't it? If it was, I'd be up shit creek without a paddle."

He nods his head as he pulls on a blue baseball cap that (for once) matches his outfit in the way his ties _never_ matched his shirts.

If nothing else, that knock to the head has given him colour co-ordination. That can only be a positive thing.

(*)

Chase steps out, steps out into the heated sun, so bright and so light against that great blue sky, and he realises it's the first time in a long, long while that he's been truly at peace with himself.

He's alone. He's alone in a great big city full of lights and sounds and scents and tastes and people, so many people…

But, he is trusted.

He is trusted to do this. He is trusted to be able to maintain and take care, to be able to walk and be free.

There is nobody dragging him back, pulling him on, reeling him in.

Even without House he feels….better.

He sits down on a bench overlooking the fountains, the hotel, big and grand and beautiful against a man-made lake. All around the front are faux Italian cafes and store fronts, designer names and beautiful faces. And he exists amongst them. Nobody looks at him with pity. Nobody looks at him with fear or worry or concern.

To those that pass by he is just another tourist, just another face in the crowd.

They cannot see inside of him just as he cannot see inside of them.

He sees a ghost of himself from years before, a ghost of Robert Chase with longer hair leaning on one of those arched walls that look in over the lake. Cameron is with him, her hair cascading brunette across her shoulders. She's dressed in dainty lace, a fine gold bracelet glistening under the sunlight.

He sees her face in memory. And, he feels her. He feels her presence just as he feels his own and she is unhappy. That much is clear. She is unhappy and he is trying to deal with that.

It's just a sense of a feeling. He imagines himself reaching out to her and she pulls away. He tries to remember why that is but it falls short. As he pushes it the image fades away as it always does, fades as he fades when he tries to push too hard. He knew they'd been here before. House told him. He knew but didn't remember.

From the little he got from the flash in his head this was not a happy holiday.

The vision doesn't give him sadness. It gives him hope. How sad he'd felt back then. How sad and confused and abandoned and alone. That image of him had not been a jovial one, leaning over and trying to embrace something beautiful yet failing; failing and falling down into a lake that isn't even real.

That was then.

Now he feels peaceful. Better than before.

He might've been married. He might've been a husband with a beautiful wife. He might be alone right now…but he could never be as alone as he was back then.

He takes a deep breath, Robert Chase, drags the air into his feeble lungs and holds it there.

He holds himself there. Here. In this place.

And, as the music begins to play he feels a sense of complete calm. Here. Alone.

Complete serenity in the middle of the loudest city in the world.

It's funny, really.


	78. Chapter 92

_Another little chapter in which Chase continues to be irresistible to women of all ages, Foreman is his usual tactless self and things just don't go to plan._

_As ever, thank you for the reviews and PMs. Keep 'em coming if you can find the time and inclination. As you can see, it's keeping me going. I'm such a paranoid eejit that I get the impression I'm boring people to death _

_(*)_

He's so easily led.

Robert Chase dances the dance and walks the walk but under the beautiful mask that is his face he struggles to react appropriately, or indeed to make the right choice. To the outside world he's a good looking kid with a bright smile and a slightly bewildered expression. They don't see his limitations because he's learning to hide them well. Anton would know no different now. He hasn't seen him in awhile but the last word he'd heard from him was that things were looking up.

He gets lost in his thoughts and the whole world ceases to be. That's when people jump on him. That's when he can be bended to will and talked into missions to the Sun and back.

When the showgirl takes his hand, she with her white glittered bodice and her blue feathered headdress, he thinks she's just putting on a show. She must be warm, he thinks. She must be warm in that bodice and those fishnet tights. He worries about her in a way that he doesn't worry about himself.

"It's free," she says. "My girls are putting on a show just for you. 20 minutes of pure, unadulterated bliss."

She cocks her hip to the side and bites her lip. She looks at him as if she approves. He wonders if that's part of the act too.

"I can see you're a boy who likes to be entertained."

"Y-yeah…"

How his teenage self would've loved this woman, her breasts pert, her eyes wide and brown and lined with kohl. Her hair, perfectly pulled back beneath that headdress. She looks like a peacock with her carefully applied make up and her show of feathers. She's not strutting but preening. Every inch of that body is a testimony to her act. She is sexualised energy all tied up in a pretty feathered package.

He's never seen anything like her.

This city's full of this woman.

When she leads him inside that smoky, jam-packed auditorium for that 'free show' she spoke of he realises he's been 'had'. He'd been warned about things like this.

_Nothing in life comes for free, Chase. They'll screw you for all the cash you have when they get you inside. Just because you don't pay on the door doesn't mean you don't pay and that's not cynicism. That's just life._

"Oh, no," he smiles, attempting to pull his arm away, "really, I have to be getting back to my friends."

"Honey, you'll love it."

"But, I – "

Stroking her thumb against his bottom lip, she repeats herself only this time more determined. More forceful. He reads the words as if he has no choice.

"You'll love it."

He finds himself frozen to the spot. He doesn't make eye contact. He feels suddenly trapped by this beautiful black widow in white and blue and red on her lips and glitter on her eyes.

"What kind of friends are they if they leave you all on your lonesome? My girls will make you feel a million dollars."

The trick here is simple. It is how Foreman described it. Get as many of them into the theatre as it will hold. Put on a free show. "Rhinestones and diamonds all over to hide barely anything at all."

The room will get warm. The drinks will be double priced.

There'll be a push past the masses to actually make your escape.

But, on the positive side, it could be fun. It could be interesting. Defeated, that's what he thinks. Chase has always loved a good show and these women are beautiful and vivid and bright, all of the things his newly poor eyesight needs in a visual spectacle (though in moderation, he's learned. Anything too full on just gives him a headache, makes him forget his own name). He likes their order, their synchronised movement. It seems tidy to him. Easy to focus on. He finds the rhythmic motions soothing despite the colour and the dazzle.

It's a good trick.

The 'trick' on the door is probably wasted on Chase, a man who forgets he's hungry, a man whose brain is so slow in getting messages to him that he'll be half way to dehydrated before he even realises he needs a drink. That ongoing issue truly isn't his fault. It's scratches on his hypothalamus that prevent him from feeling those pangs at all times. It's not the primary damage centre but there's damage there enough.

It's why he'll so often refuse food. Because he simply does not feel hunger in the same way that 'healthy' people do.

He sits with his hands in his lap just watching. Watching those scissor kicks and those swaying hips and those feathers and dazzles and more. As those legs kick up in the air he tries to name the bones.

Tibia. Fibula.

Elegant metatarsal.

(*)

Deviated from his itinerary, Chase loses all track of it entirely.

At 4pm he was supposed to be at the fountains for a showing just out of peak time sunlight. Wilson had been specific about that. Stay inside between 1 and 3.30 or else risk burning that fair skin to a crisp. The last thing Chase needs is sunstroke to go with everything else. The heat itself hadn't been too much of a struggle for Chase. He's a beach boy, born and bred, and though his hair is blond and his eyes are blue, his skin has always been that shade of golden that thrives and does hot blister. His tan just gets deeper. His hair just gets fairer.

Chase does not shake when others shrivel.

He sits in that theatre beside a gentleman named Bud who says he comes from Georgia. He's with his wife Cathy, a great Southern Belle humouring her husband's penchant for girls in skimpy clothing dancing the show line.

"I do Cirque," she says, "he does Showgirls. At least these ones didn't cost a pretty penny."

Not that it would've mattered, Chase suspects, with the amount of jewellery adorning her body.

Her smile is winning. She calls this place a 'scam' and seems proud she didn't fall for it. Chase didn't either but that's not quite cleverness. There's no shrewdness in his behaviour.

"They charge an arm and a leg for a drink in these places," Cathy confides, to which Chase simply smiles.

"My arm and leg aren't much use to anyone. They're quite welcome to them."

"Are you alone, honey?"

"No. I'm just out alone for the time being."

It's a huge deal, he wants to say, but he doesn't want to stand out. Do you know how important this is for me, he wants to ask, but she doesn't know his history.

She doesn't need to know.

"My friends are at a conference."

"Pshh. Who comes here to work? We're here strictly for the play, isn't that right, Bud?"

Bud, his eyes focused only on the leaving showgirls, answers in the affirmative.

Her smile is predatory. She's beautiful, but mature.

Chase is oblivious to the fact she wants to 'play' with the gorgeous young thing that just happened to be thrust into this theatre beside her and her inattentive husband, rich as he may be.

Bud just isn't what he once was.

"I just come here to let myself go."

(*)

They talk him into a drink at the bar. He argues at first but this is a Southern lady and she won't take no for an answer. Her drawl is music to his ears and her confident manner is something he finds he cannot rebel against. She's forty-three, tells him if she were twenty years younger he'd have been hers for the taking.

"And, I _always_ got my way."

Intimidated, Chase nods his head. He's beginning to feel warm in here and the need to pull off his clothing to accommodate has nothing to do with this woman.

"I'm sure you did."

She tells him he has wonderful bone structure, that she'd have dug her claws in tight and never let go.

She places a hand upon that jaw and taps it.

"You don't even realise, do you, honey?"

His cheeks burn both from her touch and from his own humility.

She presses that shot glass to his lips and tells him it's a little taste of heaven, something to burn his throat as well as those pretty cheeks of his.

(*)

It only takes one.

Chase looks at Wilson's careful plan and he realises he's lost it. The words don't make sense any more. They swim across the page like those dancers did that stage. He's out for the count. God only knows where he's supposed to be now but it's certainly not in a smoky bar in Bally's hotel with a lady who should know better.

The fact that she reminds him of a less cold, less rigid version of his mother isn't helping matters.

His mother was beautiful and manipulative too.

"You wouldn't think it," she whispers, staring at her nails, "but I'm worth millions."

"You are?"

"Daddy was in the oil business. I was his only child."

Rich because of her father. That figures. New money is frowned upon where she's from, he knows that much from learning about it in school. Just one look at her and you can tell that she's old school. That she was always Daddy's Little Princess.

"My dad was a doctor. Top of his field."

Best in the business - at being a doctor, that is, not at being a father.

"Oh, really?"

She looks fascinated that this boy in a baseball cap and jeans could possibly be rich. This place is a playground for such urchin Princes, though. She should know. She comes here often enough to find them all.

"So, did you inherit his wealth as well as his beauty, darlin'?"

"Apparently, I inherited nothing."

It's easy to say it nonchalantly to a stranger. Cathartic, in fact. It's easy to remain stoic and detached when he'll never see this person again in his life.

Perhaps that's the key to therapy, he thinks. Total anonymity.

"Well, that's just horrible."

"It is what it is."

"Did he leave it all to Mommy? To new wife and new kids?"

"Something like that."

"Poor baby. I'd have left you the world. I'd have given you the moon on a stick dipped in chocolate."

"Ah, well."

His attitude to the situation is the same as it was when it actually happened. Chase did not cry. He did not kick his feet. He did not protest at the unfairness of it all.

He simply nodded his head and said "Fine."

It was what it was. His father never expressed care. Love. Thought. Left him with hidden bottles and DTs. Left him with a mother who could not stand to be in the same room as him yet could not bear for him to be out of her sight at the same time.

His father never acted like a father at all in life. Why should he in death?

"It was just money," he says, softly. "Money's not everything."

"No," she concedes, "but, it does help an awful lot, don't it, sugar?"

Chase doesn't even believe that it does.

Taking one last sip of his drink he removes her hand gently from his thigh as he tells her he has to go. He can see where she's been going now. As much as he misses cues she was writing it in black block letters all over her face.

Take me.

Want me.

Be my little plaything.

Money can't buy love, though, and it certainly can't buy Robert Chase.

"It was nice meeting you, Cathy."

Leaving without a kiss. Without a dance. She'd been certain that handsome young man with the vulnerable smile, so malleable and so fresh, was her ticket to happiness. So sure. God only knows what she wanted. A son, perhaps? A confidante? She's on her third glass of wine already and her husband hasn't even cast her a second glance.

Chase smiles awkwardly.

He's feeling a little heavy headed and that can only be down to the vodka. Shakes too. He feels a little strange overall.

"I'm sorry. I'm already late. I was supposed to be somewhere an hour ago."

Her hand waves. It flitters in the air.

She's dismissing him. Rejected. Alone again.

"Time means nothing in this place."

She doesn't realise just how important 'time' is for him. It's itching at his head, at his brain. It's scratching away at him because his rigidity forces it to be so. He's late. He's missed his slot. Half an hour ago he was supposed to be at Mandalay Bay with a lemonade waiting for Foreman to arrive. What if he goes without him? What if he doesn't wait?

Perhaps when he arrives to see that nothing bad has happened simply because he deviated it'll teach him a valuable lesson in easing up on the rigidity.

He'll have her to thank for that, at least.

(*)

"Where were you?" Foreman demands and, though he doesn't mean to be forceful, it's how he comes across when he pulls Chase upright; when he checks him over for signs of damage. "Wilson's gathering a search party. You were meant to be here an hour ago."

"I'm sorry. I was – "

" – is that _perfume_ I can smell?"

He sounds like a jealous lover.

"I only just managed to get away. I was five seconds away from becoming a rich old lady's plaything."

"Damn."

"Yeah, damn. But, I'm fine. I'm in one piece. I did not die. I did not fall and break my arm. I did not pass out. I did not get burned by the sun. You don't have to look at me that way."

"You're not a little kid. Right. I get that. But you're not exactly independent either."

"I can be."

Mortally offended when he speaks those words.

He's proving a point, now.

"I got back, didn't I?"

"Late. Yes. Have you eaten?"

"Yeah, I – "

He begins. Then he frowns. It's like stepping into a dream and trying to remember how you got there.

"I'll take that as a 'no' then. Fluids? It's been pretty hot today."

_I had a shot of vodka an hour ago. _

"Foreman…"

The other man pinches his skin. It's not to hurt him, though some medical procedures do seem that way. Torture. A way of causing pain.

"Ow, what are you _doing_?"

"Checking. As a doctor it's my job."

"You're not _my_ doctor."

It stays in place, though, the skin, a sure sign of dehydration. It's not severe as of yet but still frustratingly obvious.

That one shot wasn't enough to hydrate him. In fact, the reverse is most likely true.

"Chase, it was on the itinerary. 2 o'clock. Lunch. There was a reminder on there to take on as much water as you can."

"It's not a big deal. I'm alright."

"In this heat IS a big deal."

He's about to say _"you know that"_ but what would be the point?

"Do you know the effect dehydration has on the brain?"

"I _forgot_, alright? I tried to stick to your notes but I got sidetracked. It set me off. I didn't feel hungry. I didn't feel thirsty. I'm fine."

"You didn't feel heavy on your feet?"

"I _always_ feel heavy on my feet."

"Dizzy? Lightheaded? Confused?"

"Foreman…"

"Right. You always feel that way."

"Blame the rocks in my skull."

Sometimes Foreman doesn't realise just how much Chase has to adapt to the new world. This is the problem. This is the issue. This is the big deal about leaving Chase to take care of himself, the fact that he 'forgets' his body's basic needs, that he fails to remember that the slight wretch in his stomach might be hunger and the dizzying sway of his head might be his body crying out for fluids.

He interprets things differently now.

Sometimes he doesn't interpret them at all because he simply doesn't _feel_ those things.

"It's a good job you're not further gone, Chase, or we'd be setting up an IV from the curtain rail in your room."

"Wouldn't be the first time."

House has done it a few times himself when he hasn't saw fit to move Chase from the couch.

He's pretty creative in his age and experience.

"Look, I'm sorry, okay? But I feel alright. I didn't die, Foreman. I didn't panic. I didn't get myself into trouble. I'm not dead. I'm not hurt. I'll just drink some water and everything will be fine. I'll even eat a sandwich if I have to."

The way he tries to make amends in such a flippant fashion proves it hasn't sunk in at all.

"You need to be more vigilant, Chase. House is gonna need you to be able to pull yourself together in the next few weeks and if you can't do that…"

…_if you can't do that then you'll need to be placed somewhere that can help you with that._

Chase ignores that part, focuses only on House.

"What do you mean? Have you spoken with him? I tried calling but I kept getting his voicemail."

"You remembered to call House but you didn't remember anything else?"

It's as if that's more important.

As if that's more important than life. Breath.

It's frustration that does it. Frustration and fear and that adrenaline that's slowly, slowly dissipating now that Chase is safe.

Foreman speaks without thinking.

"He almost _died_, Chase. He was hours away from losing his leg. That's something you're both going to have to deal with. He can't be worrying about making sure you've remembered drink something, for Christ's sake. He needs to worry about himself."

"What?"

The problem with Foreman is that he lacks tact. He lacks forethought.

Wilson was going to tell Chase when he felt it was safe to do so.

Foreman's gone and ruined that now.

"I-I didn't know," Chase whispers. His face is a crumpled mess. It's the surface of a cracked ivory plate. It's fine china, whipped and broken.

He looks truly horrified.

"I didn't _know _that."

There he'd been having a good time. There he'd been being reckless and stupid. There he'd been being shoved and pulled by beautiful women, old and young, whilst House had been lying in a bed struggling with the pressure of living and breathing.

What _was_ he thinking?

"Jesus…"

Distraught, he turns away, ignoring the weakness in his legs and the slight sway of his head as he goes. He should've known. He should've remembered to take care of his own needs. House isn't going to be able to.

That scares the shit out of him. That he came **this** close to losing him, that's just too much to take.

"Chase, wait."

"I have to go."

"Go where?"

"I don't _know_. Go. Away. From here. Away from these stupid lights and these stupid noises and from…"

…_from you. _

"Chase, you can't go. Just stop."

"Let me _**go**_."

It's Wilson that catches up with him though, Wilson that takes his arm and holds it firm. Wilson that removes that hat from his head and forces him to make eye contact.

"Wilson, let go of me."

Look at me, Wilson says. Look at me now. Calm down. Everything's alright.

"Stop. Just…"

He checks his pupils. His skin. His demeanour. His physical state.

"…just let me go."

He knows. He knows that Chase knows.

Then he turns to Foreman and glowers.

"Way to go, Eric."

Chase struggles to pull his arm away.

Then he just gives up.

He barely hears Wilson's comforting words telling him that House will be fine and that the danger has passed, that they should get him back up to their room so they can give him what he needs.

If he were listening properly he'd tell Wilson he needs to go home. He needs to get away.

He needs to see House with his own eyes just to make sure he's not leaving him.

He says nothing, though.

Once again, he just allows himself to be led.

(*)

Again, Wilson wonders if this is what House's life is like. He wonders if this is what he's taken on, what he's agreed to, what he's signed up for.

He kneels in front of Chase, empty now, gone from consciousness. He stares at the ground as if he's not in there, vacant as an empty stall.

He holds that straw up to his lips and tells him "Just one more sip, Chase. Come on. This is important. Your BP's in the toilet and this is he only thing that's going to help."

Chase doesn't attempt to move. To hear.

He just turns his head away, rendering Wilson's necessary efforts useless.

"I know you're upset but you have to listen to me. You need this. Your body needs this. You _know_ that. I know you do."

What he needs is for people to stop talking. For people to leave him alone.

What he needs is to be taken back now. Taken home.

He's not even listening.

Wilson finds himself asking a question of himself that he never, ever thought he'd ask as the logical, sane and responsible one of their 'relationship'.

He finds himself asking "What would House do?" 

It's strange how things suddenly get turned on their heads sometimes; how one event occurs that leaves a person wondering just how wrong they could've been about a person they thought they knew inside and out.

He picks up the phone and he dials that number, hopes above all things that he's back and he's lucid and he's able to talk.

"What do I do?" he asks when he finally gets through. "This is hard, House. This is really hard."

"What do you do?" House replies, his voice low, barely any strength in it at all. "What do you do, Jimmy? Well, that's the age old question, isn't it? First thing you do is you put the little twerp on the phone. Oh, I know. He's catatonic, isn't he? He's a sneaky little pup. If you shout loud enough he hears every word."

Holding up the phone to Chase's ear he watches as House breaks the spell.

He watches as realisation and recognition and _life _return to those blue-green eyes.

Even from a few feet away he hears it.

He doesn't know where House mustered the energy from, as tired as he'd sounded before.

"Stop being an IDIOT, Chase," are the precise, and effective, words spoken.

"House?"

It's confirmation enough that House is alive. That he's well.

He receives no response, only a dial tone that rings in his head and his ears as the phone slams down.

He breathes heavily for a few seconds, his face a vision of shock. He composes himself.

Then he clears his throat.

He takes the glass from Wilson's hands and he drinks it down in one go.

"There," he says, though his voice is smaller than normal. "Happy now?"

Happy isn't quite the word for it.

Satisfied, maybe.


	79. Chapter 93

_Just a tiny update._

_I've had SO many lovely words from people. So many. Thank you for all of them. They've all been much appreciated and I feel so much happier in the knowledge that I'm doing something right._

_This is only a short update because, whilst it was in my head, I haven't got time for more. I have more parts in my head that have not yet made it to page but, once again, if anyone has any requests do drop me a line and I'll see what I can do. If there's something you'd like to see (nobody dying, please) do let me know._

_(*)_

The flight home starts uneventful. It's straightforward. Foreman sleeps and Wilson reads. Chase attempts a crossword puzzle then gives in and opts for a wordsearch. It's subtle homework provided by his neurologists. Foreman himself has been notably quiet, suitably embarrassed for his outburst. He's apologised no less than six times. Chase has been counting. Six times over, Foreman has been forgiven.

Chase is beginning to realise that sometimes, sorry just doesn't feel like enough for some people. It's almost biblical. Repent, repent, repent.

The last time he'd made it physical. He'd placed a hand on Foreman's shoulder and said "We all get frustrated and say stupid things. God knows I've done the same thing a billion times over."

That seemed to get through a little. Eye to eye. Man to man.

No words have passed since.

His leg aches in the tight, cramped space. They give him the aisle seat so that he can stretch it a little more but it's still uncomfortable. His ears still 'pop' heavily after take off when the change in altitude makes him rather woosy. He's learned that yawning helps but there's only so many times a person can express tiredness without it becoming a cause for concern. After an hour he stands up and, as he paces the aisle it reminds Wilson of a nervous parent pacing the corridor whilst their partner is in labour.

He wonders if Chase will ever be a father. He's good with children. It seems an awful shame that he might never get to create one. People have said the same of him, that he'd make a terrific father with his kindness. His patience.

He's often wondered if his capacity for worry might just have put a spanner in the works.

Whether Gregory House is child enough for him.

(*)

Chase sits down when there's turbulence. That orange light flashes on for seatbelts to be fastened and for all passengers to return to their seats. The pilot calls it "bad air" but that doesn't adequately describe it. Wilson understands Chase's vulnerability when he grasps hold of his arm and squeezes it tightly as his eyes snap closed and his body starts to tremble.

At first, Wilson fails to make the link. Then he remembers.

_The rumbling, heavy in the halls. The grumbling deep in the heart. The inevitable collapse, suffocating the man, entombing him in industrial rubble. _

The noise, the sound and the movement - it reminds Chase of the dreams he has; dreams of being underground, of rocks and stones and bricks falling on his head as the ground underneath him falls apart.

He barely has conscious memory of the actual event but his dreams, his dreams show him with shattering regularity, just how bad it was down there.

His lips move, whitened with fear. At first Wilson wonders if he's mouthing a silent prayer.

He realises with some alarm that Chase is mouthing "Help me".

_Help me. Help me._

How many times did he say that before someone came? How many times did he scream that, whisper it, plead it, cry it out before House finally broke through the walls?

How long did he consciously fear for his life before he put his life into the hands of the Gods and lost it?

"You're on a plane," Wilson coaxes, a soft voice in his ear. "This is perfectly normal."

Chase nods but doesn't open his eyes.

His grip doesn't lessen but his pleas do.

This is the story of his life. This is the pattern of his existence. This is the raw wound that does not heal, that cannot heal, that only time will take away from him.

This is Chase's post-traumatic stress here, thirty thousand feet above the earth that he once 'died' beneath.

It's strangely ironic, really.

(*)

Once the turbulence stops he opens his eyes one by one, reluctant at first but gaining strength by the silence.

"You're on a plane," Wilson repeats, though he's been saying that over and over for what seems to be hours, now. "We're on our way home."

"I know_ that_."

Chase looks surprised that his surroundings are still in one piece as if he'd thoroughly expected Hell. Shrapnel. Walls closing in on him. He looks down, checking himself over. He flexes his arm and he touches his leg. He reaches up and he rubs his shoulder, his hand dragging all the way down to his elbow.

There's nothing attached. There's nothing inside.

He sighs with plaintive relief.

"You're fine," Wilson says again, and it's only now he has Chase's attention that he begins to believe it. "Just like the pilot said. Bad air. Nothing more."

Gently, he coaxes.

"Where were you? You weren't here. Where did you go?"

But, Chase doesn't answer. That's not for Wilson to know. That's not for Wilson to hear. That's just Chase's. That memory. That fear.

That's just his.

When Wilson looks at his own arm he sees the strength of fear right there in visible form. Five tiny fingerprints etched into his skin that will bruise in the morning. A hand. A palm. The imprints of past stress there for all to see.

"We have almost three hours left," Wilson tells him as he begins to adjust his position. "Do you need something to help you sleep?"

To keep you calm? To make you easy?

"No. No, I'll be fine."

"And if there's more bad air?"

"Then, I'll deal with it."

Chase shoots him a look, a determined look, a pointed look and Wilson has to concede. He'll deal with it. He'll get through it. He'll fight back.

He can't sleep through every problem he encounters.

Wilson respects that bravery.

That firmness.

"Alright, then," he says, as he reverts himself back to calmness.

"Okay."

He watches as Chase tries once again to conquer the crossword puzzle, as he confronts his difficulties head on yet again. He's got a couple of the answers right but the word order totally wrong. Wilson notices he generally makes mistakes with the middle of words, substituting letters for each other. The effect, in turn, is anagram-like.

"Place of safety. Five letters. Starts with H."

"Haven," Wilson pipes up instantaneously. "Safe haven."

"Ah, yes."

Chase smiles.

"I was going to put House."

"House the place or House the name?"

He doesn't quite specify but it's a nice thought. It's a nice sentiment.

(*)


	80. Chapter 94

_Another mini chapter. I could say this all the time. Thanks again for all your reviews. Your PMs. Your words of encouragement. I would not have managed this many chapters without them._

_This is only a little one. Big day for me today and my mind is kind of occupied. Thought I'd do it just to try and give myself the distraction._

_Once again, thanks. You're all smashing._

_(*)_

There is no tearful reunion. There are no violins or double bass adagios. Why would there be? They're not young lovers, star crossed or otherwise.

There is a warning though.

Chase sits down in the chair beside House's bed and the look he gives him is harsh. Cold. House has seen it before many times because Chase is not one to suffer fools gladly, nor is he one to tolerate lies and, though his manner is generally cordial even he has his limits.

His eyes sear, his words even more so.

"Don't hide things like this from me again," he says. "I mean it."

It feels too familiar. Too raw.

It feels too much like when his father died. Not that he remembers but deep down it feels the same.

"Chase – "

"You don't have to say anything. There's nothing to be said. Just...don't do it again."

With those words, the matter is closed. Ended.

With those words, all is forgiven.

(*)

"House, concentrate. You're letting a man with half a brain beat you."

They've got the cards set up on the lunch tray, lines and lines face down, routinely turned over like criminal suspects. As easy a game it is it suits House's attention span this doped up and it's good for Chase's memory.

He's winning by a long stretch.

"Ah, this is useless. You don't even _want_ to play."

"I _want_ to watch General Hospital and stuff my face with Oreos but for some reason I'm stuck with a little blond urchin who thinks it's a good idea to play kindergarten games with me instead of actually making himself useful."

House is sitting up for the first time in days.

He wants to be out of this bed, though.

"Well, what do you want, old man? What can Oliver Twist here do for you?"

The look moves from cabin fever to blatant interest, now. House raises an eyebrow. His face looks thinner than it has and it makes the arches of his features stand out all the more.

It's reminiscent of Chase.

"I'll tell you what you can do for me, tin-man…"

(*)

They wander the hospital corridors like crude characters from a sob story novel , Chase putting all his struggling weight behind the chair until House reaches down to help out.

The request was simple. He'd asked to be 'driven' to his office, an easy feat, some might imagine, but for the busted arm and weakened leg of his 'chauffeur' and the post-infection wiriness of dear old Dr House.

The fact Chase has no idea of the way is another matter entirely but he's been told to follow the signs.

"Call it another exercise. I'll be sure to tell your neuro docs you passed with flying colours if you get me there by Friday."

"Very funny."

As it happens he makes just one wrong turn, manages to scramble his way back with a sweet smile and a plea for assistance from one of those pretty aides down in the cardio wing.

"That's cheating."

Chase smiles.

"You told me to find my way. You never told me what I could and couldn't do."

"I'd say fluttering your eyelashes at candy stripers is one step up from prostitution. You're selling yourself short. I'm ashamed of you."

"No you're not."

"No, you're right. I'm not."

He mock sobs as he tells him in that Oscar winning voice that "Daddy's so proud."

(*)

"Head's up."

Chase's reactions are fast and swift when House throws that ball at him. He catches it one handed then smiles at his own reflexes.

Neither of them have noticed that they're not alone in this gentleman's haven; this glass walled bachelor's paradise.

"Oh. It's you."

Martha looks almost embarrassed, as if she's been caught in the act. House doesn't ask her what she's doing in his office, nor does he ask her how long she's been there.

She has the audacity to ask him, though.

"What are you doing here?" the girl asks. "You're supposed to be resting."

"I had my chauffeur bring me. Just wanted a change of scene."

"Foreman said you'd be gone for weeks."

"Ah, but 'gone' is such a loaded work because I am, as you can see, very much here. In fact, I never left, so really, gone is completely the wrong word. Chase, here, is gone in the true sense of the word."

"Returning bit by bit though."

Chase, hapless and wonderful, takes a bite out of an apple and stares at the girl. It's hard to look intimidating when your face is this open.

She's intimidated anyway. Intimidated by this double act. Intimidated by her boss and his former protégé, gone himself but never forgotten.

She's lived in the shadow of Robert Chase for as long as she's been here.

He's the epitome of a beautiful tragedy, or so they say.

The young man smiles. He barely looks older than she does, his face tinted by the sun, his eyes a shade of blue she's never quite seen before.

She flushes as he addresses her, this boy, this child, this man, this doctor-no-more.

"He wanted to check his emails."

"Emails?"

"Yeah," House pipes in."Those little inbox thingies that popular people get. You wouldn't know."

"I know what they are, House."

"I have one or two subscriptions due an update. Neither of them are medical but they're certainly medicinal."

Chase laughs out loud, the laugh of a schoolboy, the laugh of a naughty child.

"Medicinal! Yeah, right."

"Laugh all you want, patchwork boy. You'll be wanting to take a look once I'm done."

How confused Masters looks by the two of them.

How confused she looks when Chase acts like he's never met her before in his life and introduced himself as Skippy.

How bizarre it is. This is. _He_ is.

"We've met before, Chase. At least three times."

"We have? I don't remember."

For a second she blanches as if saddened by how forgettable she must be. It's no wonder she has no friends, no wonder she has no social life.

"Don't take that personally. He doesn't remember who Angelina Jolie is either."

"I do. She's Lara Croft."

"And who's she married to?"

"Croft doesn't have a husband. She raids tombs."

"I meant Angie, you idiot."

"Angie?"

Silence. A young man struggling for purchase on common knowledge.

House 1 Chase 0.

Masters is not even on the scoresheet.

"I rest my case. You see? Nothing to be upset about."

"I wasn't upset," Martha tries to argue but she's failing fast and the only thing she wants to do is get what she needs and escape out of sight. It's like something out of A Clockwork Orange. The Twilight Zone. She came in here for a textbook and walked straight into...this.

She looks at the two, searching for something familiar.

She sees nothing.

"I have to go."

"Aw, see, Chase? You scared off the newbie."

"I don't have time for this," she argues but it falls on deaf ears.

"You have all the time in the world. I've been keeping tabs. No patients for the last three days. Anyone would think they pop up just for me."

"I have work to do."

"By work do you mean cataloguing text books again? She's worse than you, Robbie. You know, he does the same. He uses post it notes to label parts of the body. The only difference is, he's got chunks missing from his brain. You're just anal."

She's been doing good, she wants to argue, but it'd only be ignored. Her progress, it seems, is a distant second best to her discomfort.

"Goodbye, House," she says, very very quietly. "And you, Chase."

For the first time in a long while that girl is rendered speechless.

(*)

House goes downhill very very quickly. He tries his best to hide it but it's there. It comes in seizing, grasping waves, a claw to his leg, a tight grip to his bones.

He tries his best to contain it.

"Are you okay?" Chase asks. "Do you need to go back?"

Back to what? Back to a room with no television? Back to bed rest? Back to that too bright, too big, too small, to tall coffin with his name on the foot of the bed?

"It comes and goes," House argues. "Just little spasms. I'm a big boy. I can handle them."

"I know how those are. They can be pretty brutal."

"So can Cuddy's guilt-ridden visits. I've been dying to get away for days."

He gets the impression she wants something from him but he doesn't know what it is, nor does he know how to give it. He just wanted to be in his office for awhile, to go on as before, as normal, as if he didn't come close to permanent disfigurement only days before.

Life goes on, he thinks, but sadly so does pain.

Chase sits on the couch, a familiar spot for him. House remembers so many times of finding him here, shoes off, comedy socks on crossed feet resting against the arm.

"You used to sleep on that couch. When Cameron kicked you out of bed you'd sleep here."

"What? I didn't crash on friends' couches?"

He barely remembers friends.

House shakes his head.

"Too proud for that. Which is hilarious considering you were shameless in other ways."

"So I crashed at work? God. Loser."

No. Just fiercely independent.

Those were the good old days, House thinks, the days when things were simpler. Those were the days when House's only worry for his young, orphaned charge was whether or not he was going to mess up his career by banging the wrong woman.

He remembers finding Chase sleeping here after Dibala, the stress of weeks' worth of sleepless nights finally catching up with him. How sad he'd looked. How tired and so small.

He'd ordered him to 'get help' when he really should've offered it himself.

If he had a heart he might feel guilty for that.

(*)

House can't shake the mood.

He wonders if this melancholy is due to all that raised then diminished adrenaline. It's basic physiology. Fight or flight. He fought...but now he needs this down time.

He also wonders whether Wilson was right last night when he said that the pressure of being 'a virtual father' was chipping away at him, bit by bit.

That's a mood killer if ever there was one.

He'd asked if House had looked to the future. What if, like Foreman suggested as a possibility, this is as good as it gets? What if Chase's progress from here on is minimal?

"What if you're stuck with a kid that never grows up, House? I've had him for a couple of nights and I'm exhausted. Lord knows how you live this."

"Isn't that what you refer to me as, James? A kid that never grows up?"

"Yeah but yours is by choice. His might just be damage related."

They think he's neglecting himself in favour of Chase.

They think the strain and pressure is shattering him.

"That infection, it came on so fast. Your immune system must be shot to pieces because of the stress."

House thinks he cut his shin on the side of his desk and the cut got infected. Simple as that; a very bad infection but nothing more.

How angry he'd got with Wilson when he'd put Chase to blame.

"What next? Are we going to put him at fault for Thirteen's Huntingdons? While we're at it, why don't we go down to your cancer ward and tell all the kids that Big Bad Chase gave their names to the grim reaper?"

"I'm trying to help you, House."

"You want to help, Wilson? Take care of your own issues and let me deal with mine in my own way."

He'd ignored all talk of weakened immune systems due to stress at home because it didn't fit his diagnosis.

He's good at avoiding the obvious.

(*)

"Come on," he calls out as he throws that ball again, this time connecting with Chase's sleeping head.

"Wh-what?"

"Wake up. I need a ride back. I'm due my magic juice and you're due a nice, therapeutic swim."

"I am?"

"You are. Hydrotherapy, remember? It's Wednesday."

"Oh. Right. Yeah."

"Did Wilson not remind you?"

"He didn't, no."

"Useless. You just can't get help these days, can you? Shame on him. Now, be a good boy and wheel me back?"

Chase smiles. Yawns.

"Sure."

House doesn't really need help. He just wanted to give the kid something to do.

Something to occupy him.

To make him feel better than useless.


	81. Chapter 95

_Another little update. I can't thank people enough for taking the time to actually write to me; to let me know they're still there._

_It's not massive because I'm kind of busy this week but I did as much as I could._

_Ah, Wilson's about to feel the force._

_I owe a couple of people PMs. Am in work, writing this on my break, but I will be sure to get back to people once I can. Calico, thank you for your lovely PM. I'll be back to you ASAP. _

_xxx_

_(*)_

Wilson's aunt Ida, before she'd died, had kindly referred to House as Wilson's 'bleeding ulcer'.

She'd been a confidante, in a sense. The ear that Wilson lent. The shoulder he cried on. When House had been at his worst he'd laid it all onto this woman, a Saint of her age some might say. He'd always been close to her, ever since childhood. She'd lived with them for a number of years back when he'd been a little boy and for a long, long while he looked upon her as a kind of surrogate second mother.

She'd called House, now a surrogate second father, the only negative thing that Wilson had ever heard her utter.

House never had a problem who he played games in front of. He'd once insulted Cuddy's mother for no other reason than she got in the way of one of his games. His relationship with his own mother had been strained, his father entirely bitter.

Aunt Ida wasn't immune to his vitriol, nor was she worthy of respect enough to be protected from it.

"That man," she'd said, after a night of fun and games that Wilson was used to yet she never would be, "that man will be the death of your kindness. He'll turn you to stone, James. He's like a bleeding ulcer that gnaws and gnaws."

"Aunt Ida – "

"You think I haven't known men like him before?"

Manipulators. Users.

"Your uncle was one of those men. That's why I lived with you for so long. Because he was my bleeding ulcer, too."

Quite literally. She'd almost died when Wilson was six, the perforation so severe she became toxic herself. Her only venom afterwards was towards men like her husband. Men like House. Abusers. Those that put themselves before others.

He's not doing that now.

He's putting someone else before the great, grand Gregory House.

James wonders what his old aunt would think of this turnaround.

(*)

It finally catches up with Chase, those days of stress, of hyper-stimulation, of too much exposure to unnatural elements. Smoke. Dry ice. Too long spent around a hospital picking up God only knows what germs from God only knows what people.

House catches Wilson before he leaves. He tries to do it out of Chase's earshot because he doesn't want to cause a scene and is too tired to deal with the aftershock.

_He'd heard the cough. He'd seen the flush on those tanned cheeks. _

_He'd watched as Chase tried to play it down. _

"_You're sick."_

"_I'm fine."_

"_You just told me not to lie to you. Don't be a hypocrite, now."_

_A pause. He's so easy. So easy to push. _

"…_I'm feeling a little heavy in the chest, yeah." _

"He's on long term meds but sometimes he just needs a straight shot to the system," House explains. "Like when _you're _stressed out and you hit the vodka without the lime and soda."

"If he's getting sick wouldn't it be better to admit him?"

"Choosing wisely Wilson. That's what parenthood's all about. Picking battles. I do it at home. He's fine with that. By the time I get out of here in a couple of days he'll be good as new."

"Picking battles, right?"

"Right."

Picking battles, he'd said, as if he likes to make his own fight less difficult.

What he's really doing is making it easier for both of them.

(*)

Wilson finds it strange watching Chase, his arm immobilised by intravenous equipment, sitting casually in front of the television watching Jeopardy.

This is life for him now.

This is how it is.

"Apparently, crap like this is good exercise for the brain. It doesn't even make sense."

"Gameshows rarely do."

"There used to be one in England where the top prize was _always_ a speedboat. What were they going to do with it in the middle of England?"

"Dream big?"

"Ha. Yeah."

Chase had barely even flinched when Wilson hooked up the oxygen, when he inserted the needle, when he'd taped it to his skin and hung the bag beside him. He told Wilson that he didn't need to explain anything when the older man began talking about what the medication would do for his lungs.

Wilson is so used to breaking things down for his patients that he forgets this is normality for Chase these days.

"House does this all the time. It's no big deal. I'm prone to infection in weakened areas. My lungs just happen to be the weakest at the minute. I have a crappy immune system."

"You've always had that or is that a recent thing?"

"When I was little I had chronic tonsillitis."

"But, now they've got your lungs to contend with."

"Nah. There's no competition. I got my tonsils out when I was twelve. As far as I know I can't get my lungs out. I guess I just liked the ice cream."

_It's what made me become a doctor_, a voice in his head says, but it's not strictly true. He frowns for a second. Then he brushes it off.

"Anyway, you don't have to explain anything. I have it all up here."

Up here in his head. Up here in the vacuous vat that was once his paycheck.

"It's a good job I don't get infected up here. I don't think my poor brain could take another hit."

He's so casual in his discussion. It's no big deal that a formerly healthy Australian who looks ten years younger than he is, who would run, who would ride, who would shadow box and who would surf is now subject to treatment such as this because he might never be truly healthy again.

All to save a life.

All to save a life that didn't exist.

Wilson wonders how it feels, to know that all of this is for nothing. That all of this hard work, all of this illness, all of this recovery and all of this limitation amounted to nothing because there was nobody down there at all.

Chase damaged himself to save nothing but the sounds of an active imagination.

"Do you ever resent it?"

"What, this? Course I do. Who wouldn't? I should be out meeting girls. Instead I'm tied to a chair watching TV with you. No offense."

"No, I mean – do you ever resent the accident? What happened to you? You went down there with good intentions and…"

"…and I was chasing ghosts?"

The deep breath he takes is cool. Refreshing. The pure oxygen calms him as it heals him.

"Yeah."

He talks about this with his therapists. Over and over. He's got another stay coming up and he's trying his best not to think about that. He's trying his best not to remember just how much they'll probe and prod and force him to talk. He feels better afterwards but at the time - at the time, it's the worst thing in the world.

_Group therapy._

_Overnight studies. _

_Intensive therapy. _

_The camaraderie of post-accident amnesiacs. _

"_It's good for you. It's good for me." That had been House's justification. "Shows you you're not alone and gives me a chance to catch up on my soaps."_

Chase looks down. He's searching for something that doesn't come.

"Yeah, I resent it. I resent the outcome for me, not that I did it. Not that I went down there for nothing and no-one."

"But you don't remember going down there."

"That's beside the point. I'd do it again."

"You'd do it again?"

"If I thought someone was down there? Yeah. Is there anything worse than being buried alive? Can you imagine? I saved a kid from drowning once. Ended up with scrapes all over me from the rocks. It hurt like Hell."

Wilson raises his eyebrows. He hadn't known that.

"A regular hero."

"I'm not bragging. I'm just saying. I was eleven. The thought of suffocating under the waves, it's as bad as being under the ground. Drowning. Being buried alive."

Another deep breath, just because he can. Even if he needs help. Sometimes he can't and that scares him.

He remembers the scratch of the tube in his throat forcing oxygen into tired organs and shudders.

"It's just the worst."

_Crying out and nobody comes. _

_Resigning yourself to the fact that the tomb in which you've fallen is your grave. _

His hand moves unconsciously down to the tape that Wilson has applied. He picks at it, picking at his lifeline, picking at the fabric which binds him together right now.

There's not a lot of it.

He's holding up quite well himself.

"When I wake up in the morning I forget sometimes. For those precious few seconds I don't remember where I am or why I'm here."

"Then it hits you?"

"Yeah."

"I know that feeling."

"Sometimes I wake up and think I'm still in Australia. Or England. I think she's still with me. Then I look and she's not."

"Cameron?"

"What? No. No, not Cameron."

He doesn't share the name. He doesn't share any more than he's already shared. He's laid Anne to rest in his thoughts since that telephone call. He's 'moved on'.

"It's just…it's nice, for those few seconds that I don't remember. Everything's so much simpler. Then I remember and it gets hard again. It takes all the energy I have not to just bang my head against the wall and put myself out of my misery."

Chase's words are jumbled sometimes. Tonight they're very clear. _He's_ very clear. Clear and right and poignant.

"Have you spoken to House about all of this?"

Chase smiles. Didn't Wilson imply House wasn't a particularly good listener?

"No. That's what I've got shrinks for. Tell me they completely understand. _Completely_. I can see in their eyes that they don't understand at all."

The eyes that gaze at Wilson are young but knowing. Wise before their second-age.

"But_ you _get it, don't you James?"

It's as if he senses the regret.

"_You_ get what it's like to open your eyes and wish you could go back to the dream."

Sometimes, Wilson wakes up with those few perfect seconds of bliss. Perhaps he's dreamed of a loving wife, three beautiful kids, a house near the ocean where life is perfect.

_Daddy, push me higher. _

_Oh, James, you work so hard._

_Do you realise how much I love you?_

He reaches across to the bed, cold beside him, obviously untouched, and he remembers that silence isn't golden after all.

Wilson smiles softly.

He says nothing of his own thoughts because they barely feel important at all.

"It should only be another half hour. Then I can untangle you. We'll keep you on oxygen overnight and hope it gives you a head start but you should be fine."

"No worries."

No worries.

No cares.

This is a 'nice' period for Chase. House has warned him they rarely last; that his 'peace' is often the calm before a storm that Wilson has been caught in before. He holds things. He gathers them, hides them, pushes them down.

No worries is the worst thing Chase can say.

The IRA use code words before a bomb goes off. They use them as a warning. Those code words, carefully selected, are a way of saying 'run'. Those who are unversed in terrorist language might take it for jibberish; a pointless exclamation in the middle of a sentence.

Chase just used his code word.

Wilson doesn't even know to prepare for the explosion.

(*)

It comes in full force at 2am.

The only debris that flies and falls is Chase's sense of calm.


	82. Chapter 96

_I feel like I'm repeating myself when I say thank you, thank you, thank you for the reviews – but here it is. Thank you all for all your wonderful words._

_Here's the next little chapter. It's not that big but it's kind of evident now that there's only one person that's any good for Chase and when he's gone it all just crumbles._

_Tis a good job Wilson's a nice guy, really._

_(*)_

He can't inhale, he can't exhale, he can't breathe in, breathe out.

He pushes and pulls but there's nothing.

He coughs. Chokes. Something clears and he gasps aloud.

"Chase?"

He hears nothing. Nothing at all. He just scrambles. He tries to gain purchase on the floor but he cannot. He tries to stand tall but he crumbles. As the oxygen canister collapses pathetically to the floor so does the patient. He pulls desperately at the tubes in his nose feeling the pull, feeling the discomfort. He frees himself without consciousness. Without thought.

He doesn't realise that, by doing so, that push and pull of air in his lungs will become all the more difficult.

Chase claws at the walls as if they are not papered, not solid and not present.

As if _he_ is not present.

"What's the matter? Can you hear me? Robert, look at me."

Wilson touches him. He pulls away violently. No touching. No touching.

Don't come near.

"Robert!"

Nothing. Still nothing getting through to the barriers enforced around him. He looks flushed. His eyes reflect a terror that Wilson has never known and it scares the shit out of him.

In his altered state he calls out Wilson's name, one of many. House. Cuddy. Foreman.

"Please. Please, I'm down here. Oh, God, I can't get out."

"Chase, where…"

"…I'm down here."

Wilson realises finally. It hits him.

Chase is underground.

_Sometimes I wake up and I don't know where I am… _

In his mind, in this waking nightmare, the rocks only just started to fall.

(*)

_He injured his head before he injured the rest of himself. His brain had taken a battering before he was immobilised by anything other than rocks that stood in his way. _

_For a short while, Chase could still move. He could still exist. _

_He could still pray. _

_He tries to dig his way out but his head sways and the walls rumble and he's scared to death that something's going to fall, to crush him, to bury him._

"_Oh, God, please not that. Not that."_

_Chase presses his hands together and he prays for his own soul. If he's going to die he wants it to be with a clear conscience. _

_"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."_

_He doesn't remember when his last confession was. His thoughts of anything at all are hazy, foggy, clouded with dust and smoke. _

_He doesn't remember scleroderma. Switching tests. He doesn't remember murder. _

_Even early on, Chase had already lost himself in great bit patches and pieces. _

_(*)_

_Chase rarely cries. Even now his tears are silent. _

_He doesn't cry for his mother as some might, their minds regressed by terror to a state where the maternal bond was enough to keep the monsters at bay. If anything he might've cried for Nana who would sing him lullabies in Czech, the language of her youth, who would stroke his hair and tell him tales of old with a voice so soothing he'd never need anything else. He hopes he doesn't see her soon. How he misses her, but he hopes she's not waiting for him at the end of this rubbled room. _

"_Is anyone there?" he yells. "Can anyone hear me?"_

_Nobody answers. _

_Nobody listens. _

_Desperate, Chase beats on the wall that's fallen. He scratches at the plaster that's built up around him. _

_Frantic, he manages to pull some loose. _

_The first stone hits his shoulder, the second his thigh. _

_The third cracks his ribs and leaves him aching and choking and breathing in agony. _

_As if breathing down here wasn't hard enough… _

_(*)_

_It's very lonely down here. In this tomb. In this isolated place. _

_It took him little time to realise there was nobody down there, that the 'voice' he had heard was nothing more than a voice in his head. _

_Now all he has are the voices in his head. _

_There's a kind of peace to the rhythmic chug of that water pipes that still hold above his head. Every so often he feels a splash of cold. He opens his mouth and he drinks when he can. _

_After awhile even that stops. _

_His heart rings in his ears, though there's no real rhythm to that. Somewhere deep down he knows that's not a good thing. _

"_Why aren't you hearing me?" he cries, though his voice is weakened and his movements are more than resigned. _

_He kicks out. Frustration. Anger. _

"_WHY aren't you LISTENING?" _

_The next movement seals him. It seals his fate. Did he have a fate? Did he follow one? Accept one? Or, after leaving the seminary, was he fateless?_

_He doesn't feel pain. It's strange. Looking down at the unnatural angle of his leg and the spear that slices through his arm he expects to feel agony in this, the ninth circle of Hell. _

_Fascinatingly, he feels better than he has done in a long, long while. _

_(*)_

_After twenty more minutes Chase has given up. _

_He stops screaming. He's exhausted. _

_He falls into the deep waking catatonic that House found him in, a meditative state he learned at seminary to shut out the ills of the world._

_At least he learned something there._

(*)

He goes quiet, breathing hitched and desperate, eyes wide and unstrung.

It's unclear if he's seeing anything at all.

Wilson, having lived through all of that muscle memory with Chase, administers the sedative as a last resort.

"You're here. That's done now."

Sitting on the floor, he strokes Chase's back as it takes effect; as the night terror leaves him.

"You're in House's apartment and you're safe."

Chase pleads not to be left.

Please don't go. Please don't leave me here.

"Nobody's leaving, Chase."

"You left."

It's unclear if it's that waking dream or not. It's unclear who he's talking to but Wilson goes with it. He lies to make things easier. He plays along to keep things quiet.

"I-I came back, didn't I?"

"Don't leave again."

It's quite clearly who he's talking to.

Wilson gets the impression he's still reliving that night right here, right now. That the confusion upon waking has not been a good thing this time but a sheath and rope to keep him tied in, held down.

It's only when he blinks hard, when that sedatives begin to take hold, that he starts to come to life again.

"Wilson," he whispers, finally aware if not fully aware, "Why am I on the floor?"

"You had a bad dream, Chase."

"Did I hurt you?"

He reaches out, though his arm aches with phantom pain and he just twitches. Wilson takes his wrist, pushes it gently down.

"You didn't hurt me, Chase."

_But you hurt yourself. Your knuckles are bleeding where you punched the wall trying to get away._

_God only knows what the neighbours think. _

"I-I don't know what's happened."

Nothing's happened.

_Nothing's happened but everything's changed. _

"Just go to sleep, Chase. You're exhausted. You're weak. You need rest if you're going to feel better in the morning."

Is he condemning him now? Is he sending him under with no way of struggling to the surface?

Chase smiles at him, a strange smile, a smile that is his and not his all at once.

"You look weird with those glasses on, Jimmy. Are you trying to look intell…intellect…"

"Intellectual. Yes, Chase, I'm trying to look intellectual."

"Funny."

Wilson sighs. He smiles, though it's not a happy smile. It's just a smile of relief. He embraces the strangeness, the weirdness of House's words coming from Chase's mouth.

_Are you trying to look intellectual? Like some kind of scholar? Shame on you, Wilson, trying to be something you're not. Geek chic never worked in college, did it?_

"Real funny, Chase. Now, close your eyes."

"Okay, okay…"

The drug wraps him up. Takes him deep. It drowns him and he struggles at first. His chest burns. His eyes burn.

"Ah, it really was dusty down there, Wilson. Really horrible."

The flames die down as his movements do.

"Deep breaths, Robert" Wilson coaxes as he eases him down into rest.

(*)

He can still smell it, can still feel the dust as it tickled his nostrils. He can still hear the cries of people ringing in his ears as they called their loved one's names.

Wilson pours a vodka, sans lime and soda.

A straight shot, just as House described.

(*)

"Did someone die?"

"What?"

"Where are you?"

"On the floor in your apartment."

"What time is it?"

"Four."

"Hence my question, did someone die? I'm still recovering. I need my sleep. Why didn't you call your girlfriend?"

Wilson laughs bitterly. He's drunk, the tendrils of alcohol gripping his arms, his wrists, his elbows, his tongue...

"Everything's perfect, House. I'm on the floor, Chase is sedated, you're in the hospital..."

House already knows what happened. He could've mapped it out. In theory, he should've warned Wilson.

When has House ever gone with theory?

Maybe he wanted him to experience it for himself without warning, without any hint that something is going to occur. Maybe he wanted Wilson to experience the unpredictability that he deals with every day.

Maybe he's a sadist…

"Make sure you lay him on his side. He breathes better that way. If you've given him zolpidem it tends to lower his BP. He gets chills. Make sure he's covered. Those chattering teeth'll keep you up all night otherwise."

They've kept him up before when he's been unable to tear himself from that chair in Chase's room in fear he'll disappear; he'll pass out quietly during the night.

He hides his worry well.

"How can you act like this is nothing?"

_I can't. _

Wilson, he of infinite patience, he of everlasting tolerance, can't take this any more.

"For God's sake, it's Chase."

"Suck it up, Jimmy. You think this is hard? Think of how it is for pretty boy down there. I take it he's on the floor with you?"

"Didn't want to risk moving him."

"Good. Leave him where he is. No point disturbing him again."

There's the empathy that House could never show, even now as he lies in his own pain. There's the feeling Wilson always knew he had even after he became old and twisted and worn.

He just never found the correct outlet for it.

"You should've seen him, House. He was climbing the walls."

"Oh, I've seen it. What was it this time? The death of his mother? That's a common one. The daddy dreams are less clear. He barely remembers that. They're interesting, though. His seminary dreams aren't that exciting."

He fails to mention the Dibala dreams. They're off limits.

They're buried deep.

"He was under the ground, House. He was screaming for you. You should've seen him. It was…"

He doesn't complete the thought.

_It was Hell. _

"I know what it was."

"We were talking about it. I shouldn't have put it in his head before he went to sleep. It's probably my fault."

There's that Jewish guilt.

There's that personification of all that's wrong in the world.

"It was as if he was really down there."

House almost dies himself when he hears what the terror entailed tonight. That one he's been waiting for. That ones been bubbling for quite some time.

Why did it have to come now when he wasn't there for the fallout?

"I can't get his voice out of my head. Jesus Christ, this is Chase. This scared little boy is..."

"...is the scared little boy he's always been, Wilson. You know that and I know that. He's always been a shit scared kid shouting my damn name in the hopes I'd save him from God knows what. It's just more literal now."

It's the truth. This is different, though. This isn't what should become of someone with so much promise. So much lost because of one well meaning mistake. What if it'd been House down there? What brilliance would've been lost in that same stroke of 'luck'?

"He'll be okay in the morning. It rarely carries over. He'll be more tired than usual so whatever he's got planned for the day is usually off. Let him rest. If he's up to it later on send him out for milk and beers. Keep him on his toes. Sometimes he needs the alone time. The fresh air."

"Right."

"And, Wilson?"

"Yes?"

"Pick yourself up off the floor and get some sleep. And don't call again unless either you or golden boy have died."

That's it. That's all.

Wilson puts the phone down quietly, so quietly. He looks down at Chase, dead to the world, lost to the universe. He feels….distraught.

Perhaps Chase rescues House from these depths like he did that child, that little boy in the sea.

Wilson can't seem to keep afloat at all.

(*)

In the morning, all is quiet.

Chase avoids eye contact, behaves as if nothing has happened. Still, Wilson catches him staring at the wall, touching it gently, softly, with the tips of his fingers.

It's almost as if he's trying to maintain it's still standing.

That he's still standing.


	83. Chapter 97

_Tiny Tiny. Possibly pointless._

_Gosh, SO many new readers. I must say that all of your kind words have inspired me yet again. It's a pretty hard time for me right now, a lot of important stuff going on. That's why I haven't been able to update this week but I will, I promise, and I hope you all realise that you're making it so much easier for me xxxxx_

_I'd reply to you all personally but half of you don't have accounts. So to those that do not, I thank you for your kind words. And to those that do, PM me if there's anything you'd particularly want or not want and I'll take your thoughts into account.I'm always open to new ideas and new thoughts. I don't want to gratuitously harm anyone so all you little Chase sadists, he suffers enough But he's physically prone to satisfy your needs. He's never going to be particularly strong and he'll always require assistance now. I doubt that will ever change. He'll get weak, he'll get better. He might get sick. He's got some issues with certain parts of his body. Same as House has. He's very earnest and he'll probably fall hard because he finds it hard to regulate his emotions. I don't want to torture the poor boy. _

_Once again, thanks. So lovely, all those that care enough to write. _

_Oh, and again, whoever I owe PMs to I will get to them in the morning._

_(*)_

It's so hot, so cold, so up and so down.

It's so good but it can be so damn bad at the same time.

For these two men, two solitary figures thrust together by what can only be a bizarre turn and twist of that old thing called fate, black and white turns to vivid technicolour so often. Monochrome becomes brightness. Grey becomes livid and bright and vivid and light.

They colour each other. Paint each other. They breathe life into the withering canvass of each other's lives. But, the tribulations that life gives them in black, burnt offerings is something they'll need to endure.

As House's blue eyes blend into the charcoal of his tired lids, Chase's burn bright. As House's body lags in exhaustion as it fights hard to fix itself, Chase stands tall.

When one of them is weak the other becomes strong.

That's how it'll work from now on.

When one falls the other will be there to pick him back up. It's a relationship of sorts. It's a partnership of unspoken words.

(*)

He looks so nervous as he stands in the door, his foot kicking against the frame like a shy adolescent waiting to be invited in. There's a hesitance there. He's gagged by his own sense of uncertainty, knows not what to say.

House speaks first, the voice from the bed. It's quiet from lack of true use. He hasn't yelled at anyone in awhile, not since Taub tried to steal a file back from him that he'd carefully forced Masters to steal from him.

He won't yell at Chase.

"You just going to stand there?"

"No."

He doesn't want to move either. Chase is the young man that doesn't like seeing his elder looking so grim. He's the boy scout that doesn't want to see that his leader can fall or fail because such men are infallible and cannot be broken. House thinks back to when he was younger, when his mother would drag him to the hospital to see his old man during his chronic bouts with kidney stones. The worst pain outside of childbirth, they said of that condition, and though his father tried to be stoic the pain would always seep into the lines of his eyes and the white knuckles on his hands. House would go home bruised where his father, amidst a wave of unrestrained agony, would grab his arm and squeeze the life out of it. It'd be written on every breath and in every word, grating on every sound. It'd be written all over his son's thin limbs.

Even then as a resentful son, House had thought time and time again how it couldn't happen to a nicer man. Still, there was something deeply unsettling about seeing the bastard holed up like that, his skin pallid, all strength drained as it tried to combat the pain.

For Chase it's the same. It's hard seeing House like this, improving though he is. It's hard to think of the man as fallible. But, fallible he isn't in a lot of ways. Though his eyes are tired and hazy from drugs and his body is limp and wasted, House can still see inside of Chase without the need for an MRI scan or an X-ray to his psyche.

He still has that upper hand.

"Have you been here long?" he asks.

"A while," Chase replies, though he doesn't look up. Still he looks at his foot as it briskly connects with the door frame, at his nail as it grates over the same.

"You speak to Foreman?"

"Yeah."

"…tell Wilson to cancel your appointment?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Let an animal of the feline variety take possession of your lingual membrane?"

"_What?"_

House knows Chase well. He's always sheepish after 'an event', man of few words. Coaxing is required. Gently gently. Softly softly. He's expecting to be asked to 'talk' about last night. Another thing House knows well is that Chase needs a day to recover before he's truly ready to express himself. He's like a flower; a bud on a bush or a tree. If pushed and pulled too soon then all that will happen is decline. If left until ready, until ripened, he will open like the petals of a rose, each tiny sinew unravelling as it's touched.

House can't stand the anticipation and so he breaks it.

"Look, you don't have to talk. You don't have to say anything yet. You don't have to cry on my shoulder and you don't have to wait to be invited inside. Unless Robert Pattinson bit your throat I'd anticipate you're still human."

_Who? What?_

"It doesn't matter. If more of the world were as clueless as you it might be a more pleasing literary world. Now, are you here to convince them to discharge me or what?"

He cuts to the chase. For Chase. With Chase, who looks astounded by the idea.

"What? Why?"

"Because you need me? Because you're pining without me? Because you're having bad dreams?"

If a back could visibly get up, Chase's does. He's bothered by the insinuation. His arms fold firmly over his chest and it's almost, almost cute how _offended_ he is.

"I'm _fine_."

"Well, _I'm_ not."

House wants discharge. Escape. Conclusion.

House wants freedom.

House, ever the source of amateur dramatics, wants to "leave this God-forsaken place". He'd have done so AMA only his legs are so weak he can barely stand and the feeble manner with which he sought to make his departure was such that he hadn't wanted to embarrass himself further.

He looks down at the offending limbs, at the wasted muscles that lie beneath the thread, and he curses them.

House wants out…but he needs Chase to help him with that.

"Stop complaining, House. It's two more days."

"You of all people know how long five _minutes_ can be and you have the gall to lecture me about the span of time?"

"You wouldn't be here unless you didn't need to be here."

House's own words reverberate from Chase's mouth, his own justifications thrown back at him at the moment he wanted them least.

"Your logic is skewed, Chase."

"Oh, really? Why?"

"Because you assume I can't do for myself the things that require me to be kept here."

"Everything?"

"Can I put a thermometer into my mouth? Yes. Can I administer painkillers? Expertly. Can I administer antibiotics? BP check? Yes. Yes."

"Can you walk to the bathroom?"

Now_ there's _a question.

"No. But I've self-catheterised on numerous occasions. Sometimes it really is too much effort dragging myself off the couch during the game. It's neater."

Chase smiles.

He knows he has him. He knows he's won.

"You can't walk to the bathroom and I can't help you get there. I doubt you'd accept my help even if I could."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because Wilson's right. Because you're a stubborn bastard that'd rather be in pain than let anyone try to make things easier for you. Which means you're better off here until you don't need so much help. Getting it from people who are doing their job is one thing. Getting it from me is another."

Sometimes, House curses the progress that Chase is making, progress that makes his logic sound and his arguments strong in their foundations. Sometimes he falters. Sometimes he falls. Sometimes he speaks in tongues that even he does not understand.

But, there's a truth to him, a simple truth that House finds he cannot argue with because it's base and it's right and there's nothing that can be said about it.

"I liked you a whole lot more when you couldn't string a sentence together."

House's body language indicates defeat. His back loosens just a little and, if at all possible, he sinks that little bit more down into the cocoon into which he's been bound and woven.

"You're right. Don't mark that off in your diary or anything. You have been known to be right once or twice in your miserable life."

"I know I'm right."

Chase_ is_ right. He's certainly not wrong, anyway. House _isn't_ ready to leave. He has an IV delivering medication he cannot stomach, a blanket covering his legs because he still can't abide the touch of air against the skin. It gives him a sort of frailness, the blue softness draped over his limbs, his pale hands resting against the fabric. He looks…fragile. It's a visual representation of what he is now; older than he was. Not quite the same as he used to be.

Diminishing, somewhat.

"Don't worry, House. The apartment's still standing. Wilson hasn't let me mess anything up. Everything's exactly how you left it."

Except it's not. Chase isn't. He's changed in the few days they've been apart. Something inside of him has opened up. It's visible in his eyes. In his face. In the way that he speaks and the way that he moves.

Something inside of Chase has emerged – and House wasn't there to collect it. To embrace it. To make it right.

So distracted, he looks. So distracted as he potters around the room looking for things to 'do' and 'fix' and 'make better'. How loud he screams "I can manage" without screaming anything at all.

How vulnerable he appears without even trying.

"And you?" House asks, serious in the here and now. "What about you?"

"I'm how you left me too."

"Of course you are."

It's untrue. It's a lie.

Worryingly, Chase is getting better at that.

Then it changes, the mood, the feel, the dynamic. House blanches for a second as Chase covers the tiny bit of skin that's still showing on his leg. He doesn't make a show of it. His hand just moves to adjust the blanket. To 'fix' it. Then he goes back to the television, Act of Kindness complete, no praise or gratitude required.

It stuns House momentarily, that flash, that brazen, unconscious action. It's there and then it's gone. Forgotten, as if it never happened at all.

It was the son taking care of the father.

Chase never got to do that.

He doesn't even understand the significance.

"Why does she always fall for the losers?" Chase asks, nodding his head in the direction of that buxom blonde halfwit whose life traumas have added and multiplied and bred with such frequency and fervency that it's a surprise she's still living and functioning at all.

House shrugs his shoulders.

He's never understood feeling, as irrational as it is.

(*)

She asks if she can talk to him adult to adult.

"Sure. If you want."

Cuddy's had Chase in her office on many occasions, sometimes personal, sometimes professional. Often he looked like a frightened schoolboy waiting to hear what his punishment is going to be. She'll never forget him biting his lip in fear and grief upon the death of his patient. She saw him for what he was then; a young man so in love with his job that it'd kill him to lose it.

He's lost it now. Time has proven he's unlikely to ever regain the skills to earn it back. But, he can earn something. He can thrive in the environment he could never bear to leave, in the field where he (metaphorically) died.

She wonders if this will take some of the pressure off.

"I just want to try to make things easier for you. For House."

"Because you love him," Chase says, totally out of the blue. "That's why."

"Excuse me?"

He's observant where they say he cannot be. He sees what he never would've seen before because he wasn't looking for it. Now it's all he does. He looks for meaning. He searches for what is right and what he can interpret.

His directness is new. He'd never have been that blunt before.

It's charming.

It's frightening.

"You're in love with him. That's why you want to help him."

"I want to help him because he's my _employee_. I want to help him because he _needs_ help."

That's what she says but her eyes express the same emotion that buxom blonde had expressed when she uttered her lover's name.

Chase learns about love from The Young and the Restless just as he learns about life from Gregory House.

He thinks that's how he knows.

In truth, he knows because he's always known. They all have. The ongoing saga of what should be and yet never can be has long been the talking point between these very walls.

It's in her eyes. It's been there since the dawn of time, some might say. It just so happens that Chase; poor, sweet, damaged Chase, has voiced what the rest of the hospital have long thought. Those taboo words, uttered with such well-meaning innocence, have broken the silence of a lifetime.

"I don't think it's appropriate to discuss my _feelings _about House with you, Chase."

How uncomfortable she is.

And, how guilty he feels when he realises he's hit that nerve raw on the head.

"I'm sorry. I just speak sometimes. Mouth faster than my thoughts. It just came out. It's none of my business."

"It's alright."

Cuddy _knows _how it looks. It looks like the dark red blush that dances across her arched cheekbones. It looks like the glisten of white in the blue of her eyes.

It looks like the smile of relief she allowed to cross the threshold of her lips when his fever broke; the bittersweet salt of tears that went unshed when he insulted her the way only he could.

Yes, Lisa Cuddy loves House. Lisa Cuddy has loved House for so long she can barely remember a time when she didn't.

Gregory House is her Achille's heel.

Gregory House's Achille's heel is sitting right here in front of her accusing her of being in love with him. How does she feel about it but envious that House chose Chase instead of her?

Frustration flashes.

Then she sees how achingly magnetic Chase is. How he brings out this need to just make it all better.

He shifts. Looks tired.

She wonders, maternally, if he needs to lie down.

"So, what was it you wanted to see me about? Adult to adult, right?"

It seems so irrelevant after what's just been said. Cuddy clears her throat. She adjusts a few items on her desk as if she's making a point. In effect, she's trying to clear her head. What her hands do is a simple representation of it.

"I was going to offer you a job."

"A …job?"

It's not a 'job' per se but it'll pay. She'll make sure of it. It's not a position, as such, but it'll keep him occupied.

"The library's pretty much been ransacked for office space. I know that some people don't have much use for medical texts but there are those who still enjoy traditional methods of research. You can alphabetise, right?"

"…and categorise, yes. Very well. My neurological processes are apparently improving hugely when it comes to that kind of thing."

He can put his socks in and his underwear in one draw, his t-shirts in another. He can separate his washing into colours and whites. Sometimes, when he's feeling particularly focused, he can arrange the letters on the fridge in the cafeteria and they almost spell out something coherent.

Cuddy smiles, thankful the focus is no longer on her.

She nods towards his shirt.

"Your colour co-ordination's taken quite a massive leap as well."

Chase looks down. He's not self conscious. He's proud of himself, pleased with her comments. He wants to point out that it's improved to such a degree that he knows her shoes don't match her blouse but that's pushing it and he's not cruel. He's not House.

This woman was his boss once. She might be once more.

A job. A paying job.

A chance to become a useful member of society.

"Why are you doing this?" he asks because this Chase is as cautious as the old one. He doesn't want charity and he certainly doesn't want pity. He just wants truth and, for once, Cuddy allows herself to be vulnerable.

She sighs. Her face is twisted in discomfort and worry.

_Because I love him and I want to make things easier. Because I can't stand the thought of losing him again even if I've already lost him to you. _

She won't patronise him. She won't make him feel small. But, she won't lie to him either.

"Because you need something to occupy your time while he's getting himself back on his feet. I need someone to sort through the books. I hear that's something you can do. I thought I'd at least give you the opportunity."

To be worthwhile.

To be useful.

To have purpose.

She softens.

"I always said I'd look out for you. I meant that."

Cuddy knows that it's something Robert Chase has always thrived upon. Having a purpose. Having meaning in his often she tried to give it to him when, ironically, House took it away.

How the worm turns.

How the leopard's spots change without rhyme or reason.

Chase looks curious. Then he looks satisfied.

"Wilson isn't leaving until 7. I could take a look right now if you like. Y'know. See if it's something I feel I could do?"

He tries to hard to be a man; to hide the childish delight he feels at someone, _anyone,_ putting some faith in his abilities.

Cuddy at least has the decency to pretend not to notice.

(*)


	84. QUICK NOTE

Hi to All,

I am going to try to put up a new chapter in the next few days but life is getting in the way right now. I haven't abandoned yet but we've just adopted a baby girl and she's been gradually moving in with us over the last week. I've been so very drained for the past couple of weeks. If I had the mental energy to update I would. I'd love to. I'm dying for some 'me time'.

Will see if I can update tomorrow night. In the meantime, if anyone has any thoughts, please PM me xx


	85. Chapter 98

_Tiny update._

_Gah, sorry it's been so long. I've been feeling really, really, really, really low since we brought the baby home. Total life change. It's hard to explain or describe but I've been pretty depressed. I've sat down when I had a spare second (which is rare) to TRY to write something but it just hasn't happened._

_This is only very short but, like I said, I rarely get a second to myself. I'm trying to establish a routine so I can balance being a mother, being a 'writer' and being with my lovely J but it's early days yet._

_Please be patient with me xxx_

_For those I owe PMs to (Beenie, Calico etc) don't give up on me yet. _

_(*)_

Chase doesn't know why House protests. Lack of control, maybe. A yearning to be the one to make a difference. He looks disappointed when House's reaction to his new employment is less than ecstatic.

"I thought you'd be unhappy"

"I am. Hence telling you it's a stupid idea."

"I meant..."

"You meant what?"

Chase, still confusing adjectives at times, had meant the opposite. He'd thought House would be happy for him. He didn't think he'd give him 'that' look, a look he recognises from a long time ago that he's since forgotten yet feels, somehow.

" – I meant, I thought you'd be pleased."

"Pleased that Cuddy's using you as her own personal slave and you're acting like she's given you the moon on a stick? I'm delighted. Really, I am."

Unbeknownst to Chase, House is in pain. House is in severe pain. House has just suffered through physical therapy not unlike the torture he himself suffers with great regularity and, since his medication is being controlled by those outside of himself, his threshold is suffering greatly.

They won't give in for his ploy to 'get better drugs'. Cuddy's concerned enough as it is.

He sits up in the chair, an invalid in a hospital gown. He'll be out of here by tomorrow but that's another challenge entirely.

"Why don't you apply for a job at Walmart? I'm sure they pay better."

He's lashing out because he hurts. Because he's frustrated. Because Chase is moving on without him and it feels like the game has been taken out of hands.

"You're unbelievable sometimes. Why can't you just let me have something normal?"

"Right. Because stacking bookshelves is 'normal'."

"It's the best I can do right now."

"True. You always were an underachiever."

It's a low blow to a man with limited capabilities. If one were to ask House why he does it he wouldn't be able to answer. If one were to ask him why he feels the need to be cruel, he couldn't tell them.

He's angry with the boy yet he can't even figure out why.

Chase takes a deep breath and tries to gather his thoughts. Why is House being this way? Why is he lashing out? Why is he cutting him down like this?

The old Chase would've rolled his eyes. The old Chase would've taken it not like a man but like a sponge, soaking up those words for later contemplation.

This Chase is different.

This Chase has a backbone that was never damaged by the fall yet somehow ended up strengthened.

"I'm going to leave you alone now," he says, and he's more controlled than he's ever been. "I'll be back later. If you're going to stop behaving like an arse, fine. If you're not then I won't come back at all."

"Is that a promise?"

Again with the cruelty. Again with the harsh words that have no base or foundation.

"It is. See how you like being alone."

Where he gets the nerve from, House has no idea.

It's kind of strange watching him stride out defiantly when he can barely walk straight at all.

(*)

"What's rattled _your_ crutches?"

Chase looks up. Taub, he of smug face and balding head, looks back at him, curious to know what's maddened his usually-placid former colleague.

"Who do you think?"

At that, Taub softens slightly. The prickly poisoned edges seep back and only the little man remains.

"Don't take it personally. His pain meds have been cut right down and he had to actually work a little bit today. Dr Blake won't release him until he's actually completed some of the PT he's been skipping so that's put a bee in his underpants."

The metaphor is lost on Chase but he doesn't ponder it too long. He eyes Taub suspiciously. The man, a less smart yet more sarcastic version of House, is rarely tolerant of him. Today he seems almost nice.

It takes him just seconds to spit it out.

"I heard about your episode back at the apartment. That must've been tough."

"Episode?"

"I overheard Wilson talking to House about it. Was it the first time you've truly remembered what happened? That must've been one Hell of a dream."

"Yeah…"

"Look, we all know how hard it must be for you. Walking around like a ghost in this place. Being here but not being here, if you know what I mean."

"Right."

"It's tough. And it's no wonder you lost it when it all came back to you."

Just like a clenched fist, Chase clams up tight. His eyes become distant as he wonders just how many people know of his moment of weakness; his little brush with momentary insanity.

So crazy he'd been that he had to be sedated.

So out of it he'd had to be held as he went off to sleep.

No wonder House thinks he's pathetic. Nothing but a bookshelf stacker with a long-dead Daddy complex and an attention span like that of Cuddy's daughter.

Rowan would be **so** proud.

"Look, I have to go."

"You're not waiting for Wilson?"

"No, I – I just – I have to go."

He has to get away from the pity, shown patronisingly through Cuddy and unnaturally through Taub.

He has to get away from the misplaced anger of House, punishing him for reasons he simply cannot comprehend.

Taub hadn't meant to set him off like that. He'd been attempting to be understanding; to let Chase know that they all understand just how difficult things are for him. Taub has never been too good at reading people.

He's never been too good at people at all.

(*)

Chase finds himself in the locker room sitting in front of what was once his place of storage, the cabinet where he hung his stethoscope and his long white coat. He found it by chance. Sometimes, wandering the halls triggers something inside of him. A familiar place. A familiar scent.

He knows this place well.

Hands on his knees he stares at the ground. Lost. Confused. Wondering just what his place in the world is. This was always his place of solace. After Dibala. After Kayla. And now, after everything.

He feels so small. The 'Doctor' in front of his name seems misplaced. It doesn't look right. This Chase isn't a doctor at all.

What exactly is he?

In sheer frustration he punches that locker until he dents it because why should it stand perfect and untouched when he does not? Why should this representation of him be perfect when he never will be? It makes him feel better, somehow, to damage something that represents what he once was. To 'shatter' the old 'him' so that he can start work on the new one.

To break something beautiful so that something more beautiful can grow in its place.

He looks into the mirror, the mirror that had once reflected his own blood after House had hit him for having the audacity to be right. Today isn't the first time House has lashed out at him for actually succeeding in something. It's just that he doesn't remember the last time.

There's a brave man looking back, he thinks, as he reaches his hand up to touch the scars beneath his fast hairline.

He's growing, just as it is.

(*)

"Look, Chase, I'm sorry, I – "

"Don't worry about it, House."

Chase understands just what it is for House to apologise. He won't push for anything more. He won't look a gift horse in the mouth. He will assert that little bit of his new-found independence, though.

"I'm taking the job, just so you know. If nothing else it'll give me some time to myself. God knows I need that. Too many doctors poking round inside my head. I need a bit of time to poke round inside my own."

"There's that. Plus, some sense of logical purpose, right? You always were a stickler for that. Having a purpose. Even if your purpose was just to annoy the Hell out of me."

He doesn't annoy him now, though. No.

If anything, he gives House the 'sense of logical purpose' his life has been missing for all these years.

Chase cradles his hand a little, staring down at the red blemishes on his knuckles. It's only now that House notices. It's only now that he sees just where Chase's frustration has taken him.

"Speaking of purpose, would you mind taking a look at this? Off the record, of course. Otherwise I'll be in lock up before the day is through and you'll be going home alone tomorrow."

It doesn't look broken, just badly cut. It's his good hand too.

"Did the cool, composed Robert Chase actually let his frustration get the better of him? I never thought you had it in you."

It's perfectly understandable. As with earlier on, sometimes, people just need to lash out. Still, it's cause for concern that he's lashing out at all, especially so physically.

"Should I be worried?"

"No. I was just letting a little air out. It's nothing compared to what I used to do."

House takes a breath. Another insight. Another slipped comment that's so loaded and so telling. He pushes, but not too hard. Not too far

"Dare I ask?"

Chase smiles.

"Some other time."

Some other time, he might reveal his deepest, darkest secrets, something he never would've even thought of before.

Not today, though. Not today.


	86. Chapter 99

"I have a job now. It's not much but…it's a start."

Chase smiles awkwardly in a room full of those who are just like him, a myriad of persons from all over the state looking to 'find themselves' in a setting such as this. Half the time they find nothing but more questions but the sense of solidarity and community is something that most human being craves. That's nature. To exist with like people, that's innate.

The soft blue walls reflect Chase's eyes almost as if he belongs here.

Emmett smiles and nods his head, a gentle old soul who reminds Chase a lot of his great-uncle Alfred now that he's calm enough to see it. He'd been so resistant before, hadn't realised just how much he needed to relate. To understand. To be understood.

It feels better to be psychoanalysed outside of his place of employment; away from the people who once told him what to do. Friends, as such. He's grown used to his need, has embraced it.

"Go on, Chase" Emmett encourages. "What kind of a job?"

"It's at the hospital I used to work at. It's nothing fancy, really, just a library job but it'll keep me busy."

"You don't have to play it down, Chase. It's a massive step to agree to a structured job. It's a huge responsibility."

"Oh, it's not that huge. I think Cuddy's just being nice to me because she fancies House. She's trying to get in his good books by sucking up to me."

Emmett has noticed that Chase does this a lot. He plays down his achievements, notes a subtle inferiority complex that House could've told him about years ago.

It's nothing new. It's nothing of a revelation. Robert Chase has _always_ paled in his own mind. He sits small in his seat. He barely imposes even in group discussion. That he's talking today is a world away from what and who he usually is.

"It's good that you've found something to challenge you. That someone has given you that opportunity."

"Well, it's hardly a challenge. Like I said, she's just being nice."

"At this point in your recovery, Chase,_ anything_ is a challenge. You know that as well as we all know that and you're rising to it, which is a good thing."

"All I'm doing is putting books in order. It's not rocket science."

"No, but it's a step forward. It's an act of confidence. Would you have trusted yourself with this job a few weeks ago?"

"I'd have probably forgotten about it by now."

That makes them all laugh. So sad, that this is their common thread – the fact that, some days, they don't even remember each other's names. The name badges are a permenant mark on their clothing as well as on their minds. Some of them couldn't get by without them.

Chase looks at his thumbnails. He grounds himself. He pulls his thoughts to the centre. He's getting incredibly good at it. At times, he can almost, almost pass for 'normal'.

"The memory exercises are doing some good. Even if I'm not remembering much from before I can at least recall where I've left my underwear. I should remember to turn left instead of right. Library instead of neuro-psych."

Some of the people here could never, ever hold down a job. Others don't want to.

Charmaine, from Utah, smiles a beautiful smile as she tells him "I had a job once."

"Oh, you did?"

This is the first time she's spoken to Chase. He always assumed she couldn't speak at all. She looks like a strangled bird, so frail, so haggard, with her sunken head and her dead blue eyes.

"I thought it'd help. It didn't."

She lacks the ability to moderate her emotions. She takes everything literally. She's the kind of person who will answer a rhetorical question in great detail, past the point that anybody actually listens.

Chase looks at her sympathetically because that's what she wants. His sympathy. His attention.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"It's not your fault, sweetheart. I was just dealt a bad hand."

Charmaine has been depressed for seventeen years, hospitalised for two. Her 'issues' have splintered off in a multitude of directions since her accident. She was twenty-eight when it happened, when a car swerved at the wrong time and sent her over an embankment. They found her twenty-four hours later and had to use three metal plates to put her skull back together again. She looks misshapen. Hollow. It's sad. She was a beauty queen once, she likes to tell people, though Chase can see that it's not true. She invents herself a past because she can't remember what her past is and she'd like to see herself as Greta Garbo; as Jane Fonda.

Chase would like to see himself as a good guy, nothing more, nothing less. There need not be any inventing for that to be the truth.

Michael, from New Jersey, has a happier tale.

"I got a job at a pizza place a few years back. I thought it was beneath me at first."

Chase can relate to that. House thinks it's beneath him, too.

"I'm still there now. I work three days a week and I make more in tips than I ever did in my old job. I don't have to remember anything. All of the ingredients are there on the wall. All I have to do is remember to take the pizza out of the oven. It's amazing just how handy that buzzer comes in."

He used to be an accountant before the tumour. He wasn't very good at it. He's good at making pizzas, though, and the satisfaction he gets out of customer praise is better than anything he could've got from balancing books.

"You should just enjoy it for what it is, Chase. A good start. A stepping stone. Who knows where the steps might lead."

They'll lead home for tonight. The agreement is that Chase's treatment will take place as an outpatient, the reason being that House needs him as much as he needs House. He'd been reluctant to 'stay' whilst House was incapacitated. Can't, he'd said, then extended it to 'won't'. His distress at being away from his recovering guardian outweighed his need for intensive care. House no longer required respite. In fact, such a thing might just have pushed him over an edge.

Chase smiles as he tells his 'friends' how proud he is of himself; how thankful he is to be able to be of assistance to a man that has helped him so very much.

"It's good to be needed. I've always valued that. Being needed. I guess that's why I became a doctor."

So many reasons, Emmett notes, for that one fact of his life, and all of them conflict with each other.

He wonders if Chase knows the answer himself.

(*)

"You should have a little more faith in yourself," Emmett says softly as he pulls Chase aside at the coffee machine. It's decaf. None of them can handle anything else. Chase drinks mostly milk, warm and fresh. He forgot to add the coffee once and liked it better that way.

He turns to the side. From this angle he looks barely twenty years old.

"Are you saying that man to man or doctor to patient?"

"Both."

"Must be nice to be able to switch it on and turn it off. Doctor. Man. I probably did that once. I wonder if I ever learned to draw the line."

He never did.

He never learned that sort of professional detachment.

"You're a lot more capable than you believe yourself to be, Robert. I know this accident has knocked you for six but I can see that, even with your limitations, you're able."

Chase smiles a mysterious smile that Emmett couldn't even hope to interpret.

"The thing is, you can't change a leopard's spots any more than you can change a zebra's stripes, Doctor. A crack to the head hasn't changed all of me. I've been like this all my life. I spent years second guessing myself even as a kid. I guess you could say it was bred into me."

It's hard to change nature, Chase is saying. It's hard to amend something that simply is.

"Well, maybe now it's time to change the habit of a lifetime. Because that's what negative thought is, Chase. It's a habit. And, it's a habit that can be changed."

It's food for thought.

It's food for thought and Chase is starving for that.

(*)

It certainly takes him back, this 'caring' lark.

It certainly brings back memories he might rather forget than remember, an irony since he's been fighting so hard to open up those shuttered boxes in his mind. The memory of Susan Chase is so vivid he can even smell her. He can taste her, the salt on his lips that she left in the air as she withered away into nothing.

_Oh, Mum. _

_Oh, Mum, what have you done? _

He can smell whiskey in the air as he pushes the door open. It's there. It's familiar. It's visceral and it's potent.

He doesn't blame House for this just as he never blamed his mother.

Wilson blames himself.

"I never should've let him get in this state," he says, softly. "I should've known he was trying to numb the pain."

"But, the Vicodin…"

"He flushed it down the toilet. For you."

"For me?"

"Ironically, he didn't want to be like your mother. He didn't want you to come home to find him slumped out like she was. Clearly, that didn't happen. He should've known. I should've known. The antibiotics, they just…reacted."

"Shit."

House has only had two glasses, nothing more, nothing less. The infection wore his immune system down. The medication wore his reserves down. This wasn't intentional. This was just two men winding down.

"Look, I can stay. I don't expect you to deal with this on your own. Neither of us thought it'd hit him so hard."

"We'll be fine."

"I can't leave you alone with this. You're – "

" – I'm fine, Wilson. He's fine too. It's just…a bad night, is all. It's not his fault."

_It's not her fault. It's not her fault you left her. If anything, the state she's in is down to you. I hope you can live with yourself, Rowan. _

"Look, I might not be so good at remembering how to take care of myself but you can trust me with this. I've taken care of people in worse states than this."

"That was then. It's different now."

"How is it different? I was fifteen. I was a kid. I managed then. I'll manage now."

Chase turns his autopilot on because that's what he had to do. He'd dissociate somewhat to protect himself. Back then, Chase wore masks. He pulls them on like second nature even now.

"I'll call you when I get back to my apartment," Wilson promises. "If you need anything – "

" – like I said, we'll be fine."

We. That symbolic 'we'.

That symbiosis defined in one word.

Looking at House, barely there but there entirely, takes Chase back years to when his mother was in the same state. Barely there but there entirely, her body present but her mind gone. He feels a pang in his chest that feels so familiar to him, a feeling no fifteen year old boy should ever have felt yet what became his life. House isn't drunk but the bottle is half empty. His eyes are closed. The slow jazz music that seeps from the stereo is almost a cliché.

It's the medication.

This is not like his mother.

This is everything like his mother.

"I can't carry you," Chase whispers, though he never had to say those words to her. In the later years she was as light as a feather, her body a mere bag of bones covered by yellow blemished skin as her liver began to fail.

House stirs. How pained he looks. How ashamed.

Chase pities him.

He'd hate that.

"Really, I can't carry you. I can barely carry myself."

"Nobody asked you to, Robbie."

"You need rest, House. What are you doing?"

"I'm in _pain_, you moron."

That's what she used to say. That she was in pain. That he could not possibly understand how it felt to lose a husband that never loved her in the first place. What sort of a woman am I, she would ask, that I'd rather him here than gone? What kind of a mother am I that I'd choose him over you if I were given the choice?

He closes his eyes, saddened by the memory that hits him, thumps him, clashes with his chest like a sledgehammer to his ribs and bones.

He sighs.

"House, you live with pain. You're used to pain."

"Not like this."

"And drinking is going to help you?"

"I didn't drink much."

"You drank enough."

"You of all people know just how numb a person can become through the pleasures of alcohol."

He knows. He'll never forget.

"I'm sorry you're in pain," Chase whispers, "but we need to get you to bed, now."

"I did it for you. You know? I flushed those pills for you."

"I didn't ask you to."

"I'm trying so fucking hard, here, but I would've made a lousy father."

"I know."

"It's just…"

"…you're struggling? I know. I know, House. I'm struggling too."

Mentally. Physically. But, what was it Emmett told him today? That he underestimates himself. That he can change. That the world might not be such a difficult place for him if he has a little faith in it.

Chase calls him a lightweight in an effort to lighten the tone.

He's happy, at least, when House smiles rather than slapping him away.

"Don't worry," he whispers, "Your secret's safe with me."

"Shit for brains won't even remember in the morning."

That's not true.

Chase won't forget this. But he won't use it against him either.

_I'm so sorry, Robert. Please, don't tell your father. Don't tell your father what I did last night. I don't want him to think that he's broke me. That bastard doesn't deserve the satisfaction. _

He stays with House just like he stayed with his mother, that deep, underlying fear of her dying in her sleep the one thing that resounded with him again and again and again. She came so close, so very close. So many times he had to roll her onto her side so that she didn't choke on her own vomit, the carer, the long-dead son.

House just sleeps. Painless. Thoughtless.

It pains Chase to think that he loves him, pains him more than his fast building headache does; quicker than the pain in his aching limbs throbs from the pressure of carrying deadweight up to bed.

It pains him because those he loves inevitably always leave.

That's the story of his life; a grim fact that will _never_ change.


	87. Chapter 100

House awakens to sunlight streaming through windows, its golden hue casting shadows all over his dark-wood bedroom. Too bright, perhaps, for a man as hungover as he is both on remembered pain and hastily consumed alcohol.

He awakens to the smell of booze on his outward breath and is thankful, at least, that it isn't highlighted with the quaint scent of vomit from his body's attempts at ridding itself of the poison.

He awakens to the soft breath of his bone-china sentinel and the faint aroma of lavender on the left hand side of his pillow. He smiles at that, smiles at the thought of Chase Mark II trying so hard to emulate the only 'father' he knows.

His eyes try to block out the brightness, burning as it does in his retinas when he pulls himself up to sitting position.

"Mmm. Floral."

Chase shifts, his forehead leaning against the bed where it's fallen. He wasn't asleep, he was just resting his eyes. That's what he'd tell anyone if they caught him here like this. That's what he told Wilson and Foreman in that bar back in Vegas. It's probably what he'd tell himself now if he were in the mood for lying.

He speaks softly, ever the concerned son because he knows just how loud sounds are when your head is out of the game, a million tiny decibels all clamouring together in your ear canals and trying to make themselves known.

"I thought the lavender might help you sleep. It works for me and it worked for her."

House wonders if his mother appreciated his sensitivity in her post-intoxicated state or whether she just threw something else at him. Another name, perhaps. Another accusation.

_Another lamp_

The creases on the side of his face look like inflicted scars. He's been here all night and the toll shows. He looks worn. In a sense, he looks older than his years, as if 12 hours of keeping watch have wrinkled and jaded him more than any of his own pain could. Wilson told him that Chase had wished himself in that bed rather than House, the pain of someone close to him so much harder to bear than his own.

How many times had House wished the exact same thing?

"Had you nowhere better to be, pretty boy?"

The tightness of his jaw shows a disappointment he doesn't want to voice. He had better places to be when his mother was at her worst but his sense of duty as a son by far outweighed the needs and wants of a young man.

Now, though, House knows he has nowhere to be but here. It's a co-dependent relationship they have, unhealthy to some but the air that both of them live and breathe.

He doesn't want to be hurt and scarred by the harsh words of a person in such physical pain that they direct it at him so that it doesn't turn inward on themselves.

"My mother didn't care if I had anywhere else to be. She expected me to stay with her so I did. Then when she woke up she asked me what I was doing there. Why on Earth she'd want to wake up to look at me first thing in the morning."

Half of the time she didn't even remember the night before.

"I'm not like her, Chase."

"I want to believe that."

Of course he's not like her. Of course he doesn't shout at Chase and drink to numb his pain. Of course he doesn't belittle him like she did because it somehow makes the agony he's suffering feel so much easier to bear if he's shared it with someone else.

Of course he's not self-destructive.

Chase has been through this once before. He's lost a parent to her own pain and her own needs and he won't go through that again. He doesn't think he has it in him again. Last night was spent in a state of panic. His irrational thoughts and his tendency to catastrophise blew this up into something so big, so devastating and so hopeless that he ended the night almost positive that he was going to bury this man by the time the year is out, just like he buried her.

He remembers throwing dirt on her coffin far more clearly than he remembers trying to dig his way out of his own.

He whispers the words once more, quiet, almost broken.

"I really, really want to believe that."

What scares him the most is the fact that he loves House more than he ever loved his mother and it destroyed him when she left him. He needs this man more than he ever needed anyone in his life. How can he watch him slowly ebb away?

His eyes look to the Heavens, wide and open.

He looks terrified.

"She told me she made a lousy mother, too."

"Chase – "

"That's what she said. And that's what you said. You said you'd make a lousy father."

How desperate he seems, clawing his way through the past as it reconciles with his present.

"Chase. Chase, look at me."

The eyes return to Earth. They're rimmed with tears but he's holding them back, stoic in his control but desperate in his tone of voice.

He looks done. Spent.

House doesn't realise how long his night truly was pressing his hand against House's lips just to check he was still breathing and praying above all things that he wasn't going to choke in his sleep.

There's a lot of things House doesn't realise.

First, Chase sighs.

"Can we talk about this later? It's late. I'm - "

He needs time to think. To process. Last night he felt her die all over again and it's not something he's ready to process right now.

"You're what?"

Second, he snaps.

"Just…later. I'm tired, alright? I'm not in the mood for this. And I'm late for work."

It's his bitterness that sets House off. It jars him. Shocks him. He remembers the words of a young man on autopilot, gently coaxing him to bed. He remembers him promising he won't forget.

He remembers Chase saying he'd go easy on him.

He conveniently forgets how changeable Chase can be and, indeed, just how much he's gone through.

He remembers how he processes things, positive one minute and negative the next, and he chooses to ignore that.

It's the confusion that brings forth the monster again. He'd been willing to give Chase some time had he not thrown 'moods' into the equation. If he'd not put work before any of this. He could see that Chase was struggling with this but there's something inside of Gregory House that forever lends itself for pushing. Is it deviance? Is it sadism? Is it wanton cruelty? Who knows?

It's a switch he can't turn off.

He will have the last word no matter what.

"I think we need to talk about it now, Robbie. While it's still fresh in our minds and the lavender's still keeping me calm and fresh."

"Glad to know one of us is calm and fresh."

He pulls at his hair in frustration. That's new.

"God, this is just so typical of you."

"What is?"

_So typical of you kicking up a fuss so that I couidn't go to the library. Holding me back because you don't approve of me being anyone's puppet but yours._

"Enlighten me, wonderboy. What is this trait of mine that I've somehow solidified in your tiny little mind?"

And, with that, Chase does something surprising. Instead of shooting his mouth off, he regulates. He bites the words back. He thinks before he speaks. He unconsciously analyses the likely response to his words and his mind tells him it's just not worth it.

"Doesn't matter."

It's something. Quite something.

House sees him struggling with the process and it prides him.

"Good boy."

"What?"

"You're learning."

"Thought I was underachieving? Isn't that what you told me?"

"Yes. And I said I was sorry. You remembered half at least. Isn't that something?"

He's enraging. He's frustrating.

He's everything that upsets Chase in this very solid minute.

"God, you're impossible. How can you be this way after last night?"

"Like what?"

"How can you push like this? How can you act like nothing happened when everything feels like it's changed?"

And, there it is. The shoe was placed on the other foot last night. Chase, expected to be a man from such a young age, was once again given the role of adult when he'd grown so used to being the child. His first reaction was to play the part like the long-suffering young man he was taught to be. Then he remembered. Everything changed the minute House took on the role of his mother and he became the same long-suffering scapegoat he always was. The one that House has taught him he should never, ever have been.

Perhaps now is not the time to play this down, House thinks. Perhaps now's not the time to tease and push and try to get a rise out of him because it's better than facing what this truly means.

That House is so much to Chase that the idea of repeating old steps would kill him.

That the fear of disappointing Chase is so great that House would rather tear at his own eyes for fear of staring it in the face.

He does, though. House, the man whose solitary focus is himself, moves that focus to Chase. He amends his behaviour, just as Chase is learning to do.

"Chase – "

This newfound clarity is like a veil being lifted from House's eyes. The pain is gone, seeped away by Wilson's carefully timed shot of codeine, not Vicodin but something, at least. Now that it's gone he can see just how blind he's been. The cruelty he'd thrust in Chase's direction. The demands he'd placed upon a young man that can barely tell his head from his elbow.

He reaches out to touch him. Angered, Chase instantaneously pulls away.

"Don't. I don't want to be anybody's puppet any more."

"I didn't mean it, Chase, _any _of it."

"It hurt."

The deflected anger he'd thrust at him when it was all falling around him because they say you hit out to those that are closest to you.

It's precisely what his mother did to him.

"The strange irony is that by flushing those pills I was trying my hardest ***not*** to be her. Isn't it funny how that worked out?"

"I looked down at you last night and all I saw was my mother. All I smelt was her. And when you told me you did it all for me I heard your words in her voice because she wanted me to take responsibility for everything and I can't, House. Not again, I can't."

His mother was the one who drank yet he is the one that felt the burn of that liquid as she rammed her habits down his throat.

He can't go through that again.

"I know."

"I couldn't sleep because all I kept thinking about was how many times she said the same things to me that you did. That I was worthless. That I was an underachiever. That people were taking me for a mug."

"It was the pain, Chase. It's like a big old bomb in my leg. I let it off in your direction. It was the pain talking, not me. I'm far more eloquent than that."

"Yeah, that's what she said. And poured herself another glass to chase it away."

"Mommy of the Year, eh?"

"Yeah."

"I could learn a trick or two from her."

The laugh is fragile when Chase says "Please, don't."

He sees the red of Chase's eyes. Bloodshot. The pink lines stand out clear against the white and the blue. He reminds House of one of those family members that shackle themselves to their loved one's bedside because they're terrified that the one second they remove themselves will be the moment the precarious grip on life is released and their wife or husband will simply slip away. Is that what he thought? Is that how he felt?

"You didn't have to guard me."

"Yes, I did. Now you know how it feels when you put your beady little eyes on me."

"Touche."

How many times did this happen?

How many times did this kid lose sleep over his mother because he was so terrified she wouldn't wake up in the morning?

"I'm sorry," House whispers, and it might well be the first time he's actually said it.

"I can't," Chase says, and his face loses all of its shape as he mislays himself to the fear. "I can't do this again. All of this. I just…can't."

"It was just a couple of drinks, Chase."

"To numb the pain."

"To try to feel normal. To try to forget that I'm in agony. Is that so hard to understand?"

"You flushed your pills. Why?"

"Because certain little choirboys with almost squeaky clean rap sheets told me I needed to Just Say No, that's why. Don't you remember?"

"This is different. You need them now."

"Oh, understanding nuances now, are we? Forgive me if I didn't get the memo."

"Please…"

"Please what? I'm the one in pain and you're the one that's pleading? Come on, now, Chase, even *you* know that makes no logical sense."

Chase looks desperate. He has too many thoughts running round his head, half of them compounded by memory. This is De Ja Vu of the worst kind and it's ruining his ability to think straight. Why couldn't he have kept the mask on? Why couldn't he have just opened his eyes and forgot all about it?

Why did he have to remember with such vivid clarity that it made him lose his breath?

He remembers Foreman's advice for when it all became too much for him. Shut off a sense. Close your eyes, cover your ears, try to stall the traffic. He closes his eyes tightly. He holds his hand up and covers his ears.

All it does is make the alcohol smell stronger.

All he can see is her face in the morgue with no less indifference than she showed him in life.

"Damn it."

It's amazing how tall House can be when he puts his mind to it. It's amazing he can stand at all, the state he's been in this past few days, but he does. He stands. Because if that's what Chase needs from him then that's what he'll be. He'll be tall. He'll be strong.

He'll fall apart later when it doesn't feel so crushing to do so.

"Look at me."

Chase looks away.

It's not defiance.

"LOOK at me."

This time he yells it. A raised voice always jars Chase into obedience. It's not big and it's not clever but sometimes, that verbal cue is all it takes.

"House, what are – "

" - I'm standing. I'm walking. My leg is intact. I'm clear headed for the first time in days and I want you to _listen_ to me."

He falls to his knees by choice. He sees the panic in Chase's eyes and he hushes it.

When he grabs those slender hands and centres them in front of him it's with a gentleness and a tolerance he's only recently learned he had.

The waves have passed.

The frustration, it's ebbed and flowed away.

"I'm not like her," he repeats. "You got that? This was a mistake. An accident. A one-off."

"You told me you didn't make mistakes."

"And what else did I tell you?"

His mantra.

The words with which he lives his life.

Chase sighs. Releases.

"Everybody lies."

"Exactly. Even you."

It might just be the residue of medication in his system that makes him do what he does, might just be the sense of relief that he has resolved a long-rooted fear in this young man's history by telling him quite simply that history is not going to repeat itself. It might be something else entirely that makes him pull Chase's head towards him and kiss his temple as Rowan never did, all the while promising to never put him through what Susan thought nothing of.

It's years of neglect that cause Chase to wrap his arms around House and bury his face in the man's chest thankful in the knowledge that this man, at least, can atone for the mother and father that never quite cared to.

Even with a bum leg and a body newly free of toxins, House stands tall. For him.

"Take the pills, House. Anything is better than this."

"I know."

"I trust you."

"You shouldn't."

"But I do. You're not stupid."

"Of course I'm not."

He pulls back and House's mask is back in place.

It's as if a weight has lifted from Chase's shoulders. He looks young again. He looks like House's half-wit child again rather than the sunken youth he'd become.

House never wants to see that again. That's why Chase can trust him.

He doesn't want to see that again knowing that he caused it.

"Now, call a cab and get to work, tin-man. You don't want to be fired on your first week. What would Daddy think?"

"That he was right?"

Most likely. That's the sad thing.

House calls him a bastard in his head but doesn't speak the words aloud. it goes without saying.

"Even the great Rowan Chase was wrong sometimes."

That's nice to hear.

That's a comment that bounces around quite nicely.

Maybe he was wrong about people after all because this feels pretty solid to Chase. This feels pretty permanent.

"I'll see you later?"

"Well, I'm hardly in any fit state to go anywhere, now, am I, genius?"

Neither of them are, really.

That's why they're so right for each other.


	88. Chapter101

_Aw, thanks to the four or five people who have thought to drop me a line. Much appreciated. I know I left this for a long, long time but I always felt bad about that. Life just got in the way._

_The baby is no longer with us. Long story, three months of pain and a massive lack of faith in the world. My writing is now the only 'baby' I have and will ever have._

_How I miss my love of House…_

_(*)_

Chase loves the library. He loves the way the wooden walls reflect the light in the height of daytime, the way some of the red leather-bound books contrast against the mahogany with their gold type pressing against the skin.

There's something about old books that Chase finds so peaceful in a world that's now overrun by internet and computers, Kindles and those other things he cannot remember the names of. When he was younger there was nothing he enjoyed more than to sit in the window seat at the back of the house on a Sunday afternoon and lose himself in tales of magic, mystery, of other galaxies far away, of universes found at the back of an old wardrobe where the snow fell hard and the lions were warriors that befriended children.

When he was seven he had an imaginary friend that was half man, half fawn who he talked to whenever the lights went out. He called him Finneus and he spoke like his old teacher, Mr Wyatt, who told Chase that the future was bright for little boys with brains like his.

Chase found that friend in a book, in that precious land called Narnia where he truly wanted to be.

Chase found a lot of things in books. Solitude and friendship. Love and respect. Family, even.

For such a long time his books were an extension of his old life and within those chapters he took everything that he needed. He grew. Sometimes he wished he could crawl onto the old, dusty pages and just live there quietly with nobody to tell him what he should or should not be because the characters in those books were loved and they were love and they were wonderful.

One day, Finneus the Fawn stopped visiting. Chase didn't know why. Perhaps he outgrew him. Perhaps that friend was 'shamed' out of him by a family who wouldn't let him be a child and told him that people would look at him strangely if he had an imaginary friend.

Even now he misses the companionship he felt from a creature that nobody else could see. His own private pal.

It never occurred to him to wonder why he chose a creature rather than a human.

These books are not fiction. They are full of science and realism. They're full of his father and his past self. House texts him to remind him that one of his own papers is held in this very library and offered to get him a puppy if he could find it only to blanch when Chase told him he'd rather have a cat.

"Enjoy this while it lasts," House had typed, "pretty soon that library will be turned into a staff gym and then where will you be but back under my feet?"

The change is sadly inevitable. Such is technology. Cassette tapes are a thing of the past and, one of these days, books will be too. It saddens Chase to think that these books might one day become obsolete, overthrown and overturned in favour of those tiny, handheld devices that can house thousands of them. What of the smell of new pages? What of the anticipation of checking out a library book and hoping above all things that some cynical joker hasn't stolen the back page?

What of the little kids sitting in their parents' laps clicking a button instead of turning the pages?

Where would the magic be?

As he runs his hand over those leather spines it warms him, a tangent memory of those happier times in his life, a daffodil springing from the debris of his past and emerging victorious and undamaged. Unbridled with that sense of regret.

Bright. Shiny. Colourful.

He sits on the floor, his bad leg stretched out in front, aching a little from standing up for too long. His good one is tucked underneath him and his sleeves are pulled up to his elbows. He's wearing his arm support today and, admittedly, has been glad of it. It's not that he's lifting heavy, it's just that he's using it more. This job, it seems, is physio and mental exercises at once.

Perhaps that's why Cuddy chose him for it.

The book in his lap might as well have been written about him.

_"Unlocking memories in the brain injured patient."_

For the past thirty minutes he's been reading the introduction. He can read the words now but they don't really stay in his mind. It could be that he's tired but he gets to the end of the paragraph and can't remember what was said at the start. How ironic, going on the title of the book? How very fucking Robert Chase.

Still, he tries, because practice makes perfect, isn't that what people say? Retrain your Brain is a hit app, according to his iPod, and even those who have no problems at all enjoy taking part in what he now sees as a 'drag'. But the he hears his neuro docs voices in his head telling him that he'll never get anywhere unless he sticks at it.

He turns the page. It's blank.

He smiles, because so is he.

"What are you doing?" a voice behind him asks. He jumps, startled. He's been alone in here since he arrived and had lost himself in the ambience and the solitude, in the knowledge that nobody is there to watch him. Turning, he sees that small, chestnut head and those large, imploring eyes that belong to a doe-like girl who House just loves to tears.

"What am I doing?"

"That's what I asked."

She reminds him of a girl he once knew. It's only now that he sees it. It's something about her eyes, he thinks, though he can't be sure. It's been so long since he saw that girl even if it feels like only yesterday. Time is starting to catch up with him, it seems, and things from his long-ago past are flitting further and further away as his more recent memories edge them out.

He looks down at the book in his lap.

"I'm reading."

It's a literal answer she's looking for so he hasn't misread the situation.

He searches his memory for her name, speaks it tentatively, shyly, as he looks up from beneath long, dark eyelashes.

"Martha, is it?"

He bites his lip but she doesn't correct him, nor does she notice the small sigh of relief upon not being rectified. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and she notices how large it makes his eyes look.

She says nothing.

"And, I'm arranging the books, too. Just – not at this minute."

"Why are you doing that? Nobody even comes down here."

It's not exactly defensive, Chase's response, but he does sound a little burned.

"People _do_ come here. Half the time they can't find what they're looking for because nobody takes much care in here. The alphabetic and numeric systems went right out of the carpets."

"Out of the window."

Chase frowns.

"What?"

"Right out of the window. That's the saying. You said carpets."

"Right. I was mistaking my colloquialisms. Out of windows and brushed under carpets. My bad."

Satisfied with that answer, Martha continues.

"They usually come in here to use the computers if they can't get on the internet in their department. Most stuff is stored electronically these days. Books are practically a thing of the past. This could be a short assignment for you."

That's exactly what House said. Tact was never her thing. It's still not her thing.

It's not really Chase's either, though that's more a symptom than a personality trait.

He looks up at the shelves, and the way the books are jagged and uneven. Small, big, small, wide. He looks uncomfortably at the way they sit.

"I'd prefer them in size order. It looks so much neater."

His disorganised brain often arranges things this way so that they look neat. Sometimes, a sharp edge is almost painful to him as his brain interprets the size and the shape. He arranged the shelves at home so that they went from large to small. There was no logic to his choices, it simply looked nicer to him.

"I seem to process things better if they look nice."

"You're clearly no different to any other man, then. Aesthetics above content."

There's nothing malicious in her tone but Chase feels strangely affronted anyway. The meaning sits easily with him. She's saying he's shallow. He can understand that now.

Anne used to say he was shallow too sometimes but she never meant it.

"Anyway, what are _you_ doing here if you're not looking for a book?" he says, hoping to catch her out.

"I came to see how you were doing. And to pick up a diagnostic manual for Foreman."

Jeopardy. Bingo. Whatever the word is.

"So you _were_ looking for a book?"

"No, Foreman was. He just didn't want to come down here himself because he's busy with a patient. It's not urgent. I was about to take my lunch break. I told him I'd pick it up for him."

"And spy on me while you were at it?"

"Yes."

He laughs at that. People would generally become flustered and utter a string of denials. He doesn't really understand why. He knows he's still closely monitored so people might as well just be honest about it. He understands the need for it. People are afraid he'll climb a ladder and hurt himself or wander off and get lost. He doesn't think he would but he can't exactly be sure.

She falters a little.

"I'm sorry, Foreman asked me to."

"It's fine, Martha. I didn't expect anything else."

"You didn't even remember me last time we met."

Chase scratches at the back of his neck, boyish, apologetic. This is one of the reasons why he wanted this job, because it's away from people whose names he might forget and whose eyes might show that little dash of hurt when he can't recall them.

She doesn't look hurt. As appears to be customary she's simply stating a fact.

"It comes and goes. Sometimes I remember people, sometimes I don't. I'm sorry. I'll remember you now, don't worry."

Repeating The Young and the Restless he says "I never forget a pretty face" because he wants to be liked and girls like that sort of thing. "Isn't that what a typical man would say?"

She blushes at those words. It's girlish, wholly unlike her. It's pleasant on her face. Chase _does _think she has a pretty face. So did Annaliese, the girl she reminds him of. Martha is stranger than Annaliese. No doubt he's strange to her too. Sometimes he's even strange to himself, an alien creature living in the body and mind of a man who was once Robert Chase.

What is he now?

(*)

It's not that Martha knows him, nor that she cares but she has to admit to being curious about this man she's heard so much about, this doctor whose name was known in circles before he went literally underground.

_He was once such a brilliant young man._

_It's such a shame seeing him organise books when once upon a time he was contributing to them._

_He never realised how handsome he was. _

It's only now that she looks at him she realises he's as attractive as the nurses all insist; that his face is chiselled and beautiful and his eyes are clear and bright. Objectively speaking, she can admit that they are right and she catalogues it as a 'fact' against his name.

It doesn't 'move' her in the way it moves them. It just…is.

"I've read your papers, Dr Chase."

"You don't have to call me Doctor."

"Why not? That's what you are, isn't it?"

"Not anymore. I'm some kind of librarian now. Some kind of…book guy."

"Well, then, I read _Dr Chase's_ papers."

Chase smiles at that concession. House is wrong about this girl. She _can_ listen. She _can_ process.

Sometimes, so can he.

"And, what did you think of _Dr Chase's_ papers?.

"I thought they were interesting. I did a thesis on one of them."

"Yeah?"

"The effect of stimulation in ICU settings and the frequency of Post Intensive Care Syndrome. You have very thorough theories."

She looks confused after she says those words because if he's not a doctor any more is this still the case?

"Or, had."

In her black and white mind she splits him into a Before and After. The man Before was a doctor, a theorist, a surgeon, a specialist. The man After arranges books in a library that nobody ever uses because it gives him something to spend his time on. If he fails to see it's nothing more than a glorified memory exercise then he's not the man he used to be and never will be.

He's looking at her expectantly, though. She doesn't know why. Has she said something wrong?

"Was that rude? Is 'had' the right word?"

Sometimes, she struggles with cues just like he does. Thankfully, Chase After shrugs, doesn't appear to mind. She wonders if Chase Before would've.

"I don't remember any of those theories so I guess it was the right word. The right...tense?"

"That's right. Very good."

If he feels patronised by her bland praise he doesn't make it obvious.

"I guess I'd have quite a different opinion on the topic now."

"Now that you've been there?"

"Yeah. A lot."

"And were you over-stimulated when you were in there?"

"_And_ the rest."

He knows ICU intimately and with too much frequency of late. He remembers pinch, pressure, oblivion. He remembers pain as a diagnostic tool and the sharp edges of sleep slicing at him as it took him down, but not far down enough. Sights. Sounds. Noise and light, the dim haze of sedation only partially protecting him from the hellish torments those doctors inflicted on him in the name of recovery.

The place makes him panic now.

It makes him remember some things that make sense and some things that don't. He stifles a shudder as he momentarily flashes back to the choking sensation of a tube in his throat and the devastating effects of too much noise on an overstimulated patient.

The absently rubs his neck. His wrists.

"Sorry."

He's proving his own theories, here, and he doesn't even know it.

"You'd be a good study for yourself," Martha states and he smiles at that.

"I'm a good study for everyone."

"So it would seem."

She takes a seat, hopes she isn't imposing. Foreman told her to make it quick and to leave him be, that he won't 'perform' when he's watched and her presence would undoubtedly distract him as he has trouble focusing on a task if he also has to focus on a person. She made a comment about men being unable to focus on two tasks at once whether they're brain damaged or not but it's clear she heard that on a talk show. She has little experience with men and it shows.

Chase looks at his watch. Martha notices it's a push button digital watch with a quiet voice that tells Chase the time when he presses the side of it. He has four alerts set. Each inform him of a task he needs to complete. Work. Meds. Lunch. Rest.

This would've been useful in Vegas.

"It's probably time I took my inhaler. I've been in here a couple of hours and my lungs can get a bit, ah..."

" - My brother is asthmatic. He's allergic to dust and horsehair. He uses an inhaler. You don't need to explain it to me."

"Really?"

"Yes."

Right, then. Chase looks at this girl as she places her hands in her lap and he blinks a little. There's a curious smile that plays on his lips as he processes her literal speaking and her tendency to state solid facts. Socially inept, they might call her, and he wonders if this is how he comes across to other people. He likes it. She's straightforward. He doesn't feel like he's going to stumble upon some hidden meaning that he doesn't know how to read.

He wishes more people were like Martha.

Perhaps he is.

It's interesting, at least, to see things from the outside. If this is, indeed, how he comes across then it's no wonder people are careful with him. They make an awkward pair, he can see, and anyone watching them or listening to them would think them something short of themselves. The fact that he _notices _her strangeness is yet another sign that things are improving for him. His cognizance is building and his sense for what is normal and abnormal is starting to breathe life into itself.

He gets up, moves to sit down beside her. If she notices how he turns his head when he takes his meds then she's polite enough to hide the fact and he's grateful for that.

"Y'know, I found my father's book before. C for Chase. He was on the third shelf."

"Your father? Rowan Chase. Age 63. Deceased, but world renowned in life."

She speaks these facts as if reading from a catalogue sheet in her mind. In some ways it's the way that Chase thinks. He'll take a name or a word and he'll try to build around it. She speaks aloud which is something he has learned not to do for fear of strange looks from people on 'the outside'.

He tries to clear his throat. Struggles a little. She looks at him for a moment then looks away when he composes himself.

"Yeah. Yeah, that's the guy."

"What did you think of his book?"

"I thought the cover was pretentious, the dedication was completely false and the photograph on the inside made him look bloated. But, other than that, it was fine. If you like that sort of thing."

She smiles at that.

"You sound just like him."

"Like who, my Dad?"

He still struggles with indirect speech, probably always will.

She didn't know that.

"No, not your dad. House."

He doesn't know whether to take it as an insult or a compliment.

Martha offers no explanation whatsoever.

(*)

"Oh _please _don't tell me you're engaging in foreplay."

It could almost be.

Chase is sitting with his shirt pulled up, Martha sat behind him with a stethoscope pressed against his back. Taub, sent to retrieve her, averts his eyes. He knew people came to the library to fool around, it's the worst kept secret in this place, but these two?

The look at him with blankly, two pairs of owlish eyes holding nothing whatsoever in them. There's nothing to suggest they've been 'caught in the act' at all.

"I was listening to his lungs, Taub."

"Listening to his lungs. Right. Because that's what you do on your lunch break."

"What did you think I was doing? The dust was getting to him. He needed an extra hit because he couldn't catch his breath. I wanted to see what difference his inhaler made to his respiratory sounds because I thought he might've needed something more."

That…makes sense.

Shame on Taub.

"And the verdict was?"

"Adequate treatment. Clearer within a minute or so."

She pulls Chase's shirt down clinically and methodically. It doesn't occur to her how that might've looked from the outside to a man with a dirty mind.

_Playing doctors and nurses. _

"All good, Chase," she says almost gently.

Chase takes a deep breath, hand on his chest. She'd seen him look defeated and then scared. House is wrong about the Asperger's. She can empathise and read just fine.

"I feel better," Chase says, relieved. "Thank you."

Taub seems relieved too. In truth, there's something kind of uncomfortable about the thought of people like this two engaging in that way. It's not that he thinks less of them but neither of them seem capable.

"Foreman sent me to get you, Masters. The cultures on Mrs Adams are back."

"Okay, sure."

She turns to Chase.

"Remember, take deep breaths periodically and try not to unsettle the pages too much. Some of these books haven't been touched in a long time,"

"Yes, doctor,"

"This is why electronic is so much better. Neater. You like neat, don't you?"

"Yeah I do, but where's the magic in that kind of neatness?"

She looks at him. Frowns.

"You're strange,"

"Yeah, probably."

Maybe he always was.

(*)

"I talked to Martha today."

"Who?"

"House, you _know_ who."

He's obstinate for the sake of it, it seems.

"Talked _with_, talked_ to_ or were talked _at_? The girl isn't exactly skilled in conversation."

"She was fine. We understood each other. Kind of."

"_What_?"

"We got along."

"Oh, dear God, no, imagine the children. With her Autistic Spectrum Disorder and your holy brain they'd have absolutely no chance whatsoever."

A busy day has Chase's brain fried. A lack of sleep from the previous night has him frazzled beyond belief.

"We were just talking, House."

"The first step, Chase. The next step is generally sexual intercourse and, by Lord, you're not going there until you remember that you're not the kind of man who beds idiots. Well…other than Cameron, that is, but she's an aside."

"I'm not the kind of – what?"

"I'll cut you some slack because you're stupid but…._we understand each other_? That's a euphemism, it really is."

Chase mouths the word 'euphemism' because he can't remember it. What does that even mean?

"It's nothing like that. I don't want to "bed her."

Air speech bubbles. Where did he learn that?

"It was just _nice_. To talk. Without feeling like _I_ was the strange one."

"You're _alway_s the strange one. You've always been the strange one. That was your thing."

And, it still is, only now it's laced with sympathy.

"It was just good to have a literal conversation with no hidden meanings to trip me up."

"I'm sure it was and as long as that's all you're doing then talk away."

"It was. She was…helpful."

"For Gods sake, Chase, don't use her as a template for building up your social skills. That's the blind leading the…the blinder."

He trails off when he speaks. Chase hears it. House is in pain, Chase can see it. He doesn't say anything. Chase hears it, though, hears it in the subtle inflections in his voice, in the way his fingers are white with the pressure he's putting into his thigh.

He's noticing more and more, remembering more and more. It's almost as if this jolt of fear that House has given him has opened him up in ways that nothing else had. The absolute terror of losing him gave him the kick he needed.

Still, it's hard for him to interpret what he sees a lot of the time. The only reason he processes this is because he sees his own 'tells' in House. He knows what pain looks like and sounds like, though. It's written all over House's body like a Henna tattoo that seeps into his every bone.

Chase sits down beside him and looks at him, _really_ looks at him.

"Are you okay?"

"Are _you_?"

"Stop dejecting, House,"

"Projecting. Deflecting. Congratulations, you combined the two. I'm dandy, Chase. But you're swaying on your feet. Sit down."

"It's been a long day."

"Of course Reading books and talking to girls. Real long. Take a pew. I'm in no condition to pick you up if you fall."

He leans back.

"Daddy's tired son."

"Yeah, yeah."

Chase, practically falling into the comfort of the couch, mirrors him, his own bum leg thrust up on the coffee table, his not-so-perfect-arm lying motionless at his side. It's aching a little but he can deal. He's zoning a little but he can pull it together.

"Have you taken your meds?" House asks.

Chase turns his head to the side. It's only now that House sees how exhausted he is. Still, he tries to brighten up. He tries to throw it back.

He smirks.

"Have _you_?"

"Now who's 'dejecting', huh?"

"Everything I am is down to you, House."

It is what it is. He does push, though. Last night affected him so badly that he never wants to go through that again. He never wants to imagine House in such pain that he'll drown his sorrows to the point of no return.

"So - did you take them? The Vicodin?"

"Just waiting for them to kick in. Washed down with liquid plutonium and bleach - but not whiskey. Never whiskey, Chase, I promise."

"I know, House."

"Well, that's fine, then."

They're quiet for a little bit, these two, just sitting side by side in their place with their TV on quietly and their visible limitations on full display on the tabletop. House sees their reflection in the surface and looking at Chase is like looking at himself only younger, stronger, brighter, less jaded.

He envies the kid in this moment because it's not too late for him.

Maybe it's not too late for House either.

"So, Masters. Little miss Eminem."

"What about her?"

"You're not, like, _friends_, are you? You're not 'totally best buds', are you? I'm not going to have to suffer through her outside of work as well as inside of it, am I?"

"We just had lunch together. That's it. She's not my type at all, House."

"Of course not. Because you're not two peas in a dysfunctional pod, are you?"

"She was a little weird, to be honest. Nice, but she didn't act like other people."

"Oh, you noticed?"

"Yeah, I noticed. Is that how I am, House?"

"What, robotic? Literal? Like a dog with a bone when it comes to pedantics? Nooo. Not you. Not at _all_, Chase."

"House - "

"So what if it is? Would you rather be boring?"

"I'd rather be normal."

"And, what's that, these days? Huh? What's normal?"

House smiles through his pain. He turns to Chase and looks at him.

He leans over and he puts a hand to his head, to the healing scar, to the hair that's still baby-fine even as it's growing.

"You're a Mac with some memory issues, Chase. She's Windows 2000. There's no comparison whatsoever. You're still my favourite robotic, literal pedant. Don't worry."

"I'm not worried."

No, he's not worried.

He's learning to live with himself. He's learning to accept what it is that people see of him and in him. He's learning to tolerate the curiosity and the patronising behaviour that often comes his way. He's learning to enjoy the preferential treatment and the softness and care with which people treat him because when did anyone ever care before?

All it took was a knock to the head.

"My Aussie basket case is growing up," House sighs, as he leans back and scratches the back of his head with that distracted sense of place. "He's got a job. He's making friends.

Will there ever be room and time for your old man? Will you forget where you came from?"

"Probably," Chase says, honestly, "but you've keyed in the address into our phone and your name and telephone number's on my medicalert so I'll always come back to you."

"Well, there is that, at least."

"Yeah, there is that. Now, did you take your meds?"

"House – "

"I'm not going to tell you again, Chase. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. You look terminal at the minute."

"Thanks."

"Just - take an Ambien and don't let me hear a peep from you until morning. Or I'll ground you without thinking twice about it."

"Okay. Alright."

Chase won't, though. He wants to be awake and alert should anything go wrong.

He wants to know that he'd be right there if this man who has given him so very, very much needed him by way of return.

House closes his eyes. The day has taken a toll on him, too. But, he's here. He's here and he's real and he's solid and that means so very, very much to the strange, gentle, unpredictable and eccentric kid that sits so attentively beside him.


	89. Chapter 102

_Aw I just have to say thank you for all the lovely comments and PMs I have received. I abandoned all for well over a year and some of you are still willing to pick up and rejoin the ride. That means so much to me._

_It took me a long time to get back to normal after the adoption of that little girl fell through. Things happen for a reason and I know that she is not with us because she was not meant to be with us. It's only now, 18 months later, that I am starting to come to terms with that. But I am here at least for this period of time and I hope you will all continue to enjoy my little tale. _

_This chapter isn't a pleasant chapter but it's a necessary one. _

_(*)_

For the first time in as long as he can remember, Chase has felt capable. Capable of doing things for himself. Capable of making his own way. Capable of being a normal human being in the broadest sense of the words.

He stands at the bus stop waiting for his ride and the morning is beautiful. He slept well, eventually. House slept well, pain free and peaceful. This morning, for the first time in days, he managed to put weight on the leg he so nearly lost and it was a blessing. It was a triumph. Chase saw the look that passed his guardian's eyes, a look which told him that all would be well and all would be fine and, though he would not 'fall beneath himself' and express happiness at the sensation it was something which made him feel relieved.

Before Chase headed out for the morning he wrote the instructions on his hand because he can't be trusted with a note. There they are in big black letters, an easy set of steps for most but difficult for someone in his position. Get on the bus, it says. Pay the driver. Wait for your stop. Get off. Go to work. Without these notes his nerves would get the better of him. It's a logical task with logical steps but logic isn't his strong point lately. He'd insisted.

"I want to make my own way."

Like a father cutting those tight apron strings, House had been forced to let him try.

"If you end up in Wyoming," he'd said, "don't expect me to come get you. You'll have to get a job on a ranch and hope for the very best."

Chase always hopes for the very best and, when he successfully pays his fare on that dark green bus it feels very much that way - the very best. A personal achievement. It's not a doctorate, nor is it a medical breakthrough but, in the grand scheme of his life at present, it's noteworthy.

He sits down by the window near the back. It seems safer there. The vibrations of the movement relax him like movement always does and, as he looks out of the window and watches as the world passes him by it's with a stark sense of familiarity.

He knows that store.

He knows that flower van selling daffodils and tulips to whimsical passers-by.

He knows that old man playing guitar near the bus shelter because he's seen him before.

He smiles. In the early morning light he looks lupine. Deer-like. If anyone saw the faint smile on his face they could never, ever imagine why it's there. After all, it's just a bus ride. To him, it's a mountain climbed and scaled.

It's just another little accomplishment to add to his growing list.

There's a man sat at the back. Chase can't see him but he can hear him and, if he looks in the window he can just about make out the man's reflection. He's old, looks to be in his sixties. He has a look of Ian McKellan, Chase thinks, with a dashing of white stubble on his jaw and an old woolen hat on his head.

The man speaks of God and the Devil, of the Government, of the Military. He speaks in a rhythm that follows the pattern of the wheels on the ground and it's jarring in how unnatural it is.

"The Lord," he says, "pays no heed to the modern man. The only ones that are watching are the Government."

Words flash through Chase's mind like equations dancing across a whiteboard. Red words on a clear background. Capital letters. The forceful scratch of the pen against the surface.

_Paranoid ideation. _

"This city is riddled with crime."

"Be quiet, Barry," somebody says, "nobody's got time for your preaching today."

_Schizophrenia. _

"Put your sword back into its place," the man says, "for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword."

_Could it be drugs? _

House's voice dismisses him in his own head.

_"It's not drugs, you idiot."_

Unbeknownst to Chase he is recreating a differential. It's not a conscious act on his part but, as this man stands and beholds the will of the Lord and denounces the wickedness of Barack Obama and his band of merry oppressors, Chase begins to diagnose him.

He turns to look at the man, really look at him. He's the only person on the vehicle that does so. He's noticed how people tend to look away when he experiences a meltdown of his own; how those that do not know want no part of what it is he is suffering.

Nobody wants to look at Barry, clearly euphoric and delusional in equal measure.

"I am a man of God, not a man of this nation's government. I rise above."

Chase looks this man in the eye and it might well be the first time anyone has done that in years. Perhaps it's not the wisest move but there's sincerity in it.

"You know," the man says, catching Chase's gaze. "_You _know."

_Does_ he know?

_Does_ he see?

"I do, I..."

"**You know."**

The guy sits down next to him and instantaneously crowds him. Chase leans against the window putting distance between them. In some ways he's sorry he spoke, in other ways not sorry at all because he feels the words inside of his head liberating themselves, somehow, as he bathes in this man's apparent madness.

"You know, dear boy."

He hears a voice behind him telling him he's asked for it and he doesn't quite know what that means.

"You see, don't you?" the Lord's paranoid messenger tells him. "You see what I see."

"What do you see?"

Five minutes, Chase has been on this bus. Five minutes and already there's been an event.

Perhaps his life before was a series of events and this is just a continuation of the same.

The man begins his diatribe. It's long and extensive and covers all elements of God, religious, war and crime. He speaks at great length about how God has washed his hands of his Children, how the Government has taken His Almighty place on this green, green Earth and are burrowing their way into all of our souls.

"Did you know," he asks, "that nine out of ten people are working for _them_? Did you know that the majority of people on this very bus are messengers for the State and have turned their back on Christ without even knowing what that means?"

He whispers conspiratorially when he tells Chase "they know what you're thinking."

It makes him smile. Part of Chase identifies with this man's tangents, with the maze that is his mind and his thoughts.

"Half the time I don't even know what I'm thinking myself."

It's the innocent denial that gets the man's back up. In that instant his tells begin to show, his darting eyes, his wringing hands, his back, rigid as stone as if a seizure has taken hold and forced him that way. Sensing the change, Chase blanches a little. Has he said something wrong? The man looks so angry. There's fire in his blue eyes and, because Chase has opened himself up to it, it seems to be aimed in his direction.

"You think I'm wrong?"

"No, I – "

"You think there's something wrong with me?"

"Paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur," Chase says automatically. It's a reflex action, nothing more. He doesn't even know where it came from but it's there.

Spoken aloud, it's like an unpinned grenade.

The man backs off a little, mistrust in his eyes.

"They're talking in your ear."

"Nobody is talking."

"I can hear them. They're talking to you. About me."

His voice raises a notch. Then another. The woman who had passed such a cryptic, amused comment about Chase 'asking for it' only moments ago now sounds a little concerned.

"Sit down, Sir, you're making a scene."

To Chase, she whispers "Don't engage him any further, son, he might be dangerous."

"_You_ _people_ are dangerous," he insists. "All people are dangerous because there's no room for God any more."

He gets up. The woman sighs.

"Oh, here we go."

He paces like a wolf down the aisle. The bus driver stops, unable to continue until the commotion dies down. He tells Barry to sit down and be quiet but the man doesn't hear. His mission is too loud. His thoughts are too strong.

His delusions are too fervent.

"_People _are dangerous, not me. Obama keeps slaves. You're all slaves of his rule. You're all soldiers. He's no better than Hitler. Mugabe. Stalin. Milosevic."

_Dibala._

"Rwanda. Sierra Leone. Kosovo and Bosnia. And now _Obama's_ getting in on the act. What God would allow that? Huh? What God would allow that?"

_A patient on his back. A leader. _

_A world renowned tyrant bleeding out from his nose and mouth. _

Chase blinks once, twice, tries his best to focus. What is that? He's seen it before. What does it mean?

_Dibala is dead. _

"The world is full of disciples, but not of God. Not of God."

_"Don't ask me questions you don't want to know the answers to."_

The flashes and the images overwhelm Chase as they have done before. They are there and then they are gone. He has written about this before, he knows he has, but he can't quite grasp the thoughts in his head.

He scrambles for his notebook only for his arm to be grabbed. It hurts him. He makes a noise of discomfort that goes unheard.

"Are you a reporter, kid?"

"N-no, I"

"Are you gonna write this down? Write it down. Write it down now. The world needs to know what i have to say. Nobody wants to listen."

He grabs Chase's pen and it's as if he's stealing his lifeline.

"Please, I_ need_ that."

"Is there a microphone in this thing?" Into the pen he asks "Can everybody hear me?"

Panicked, Chase lets his subsconscious take over.

"Haldol. Thorazine. Both of which would have an effect on the patient's current psychotic state. Route via intramuscular injection would be the fastest course of action."

He's not saying it to anyone in particular. He's not saying it consciously at all. He's just saying it. Then he's saying nothing at all.

_You killed a man. _

"You want me silenced like all the rest of them. You talk of meds like you know what they mean."

Chase closes his eyes and tries to count to ten to calm himself. He gets as far as three and can't count any more.

He can't remember what comes next.

"Tell me," the man asks him, conspiratorially, depreciatively, "when Judgement Day comes will _you_ be allowed to pass?"

Chase sees himself in a confessional box, the dim light casting crosses against his face that almost look like the cages of a prison van.

Perhaps it was foreshadowing.

_Bless me, father, for I have sinned. _

The breath he takes is deep and hard.

_I killed someone. _

He freezes, then, his own past hitting him square in the chest in a form that he doesn't understand. That, and the noise in the bus, it's too much for him.

He shuts down before his mental assailant can continue.

"Will you?" the passenger asks again, calming now as Chase begins to drift. He stares off, doesn't respond. His hand starts to tremble, nervous energy translating to a physical response as his fingers begin to tap against his leg against his will.

The man points to his hand.

Chase doesn't see.

"See? That's the devil leaving your body. It's fighting its way out. There's hope for you yet. But not for all of these."

The passenger sits back down, falls back to silence. He rests his own hands on his lap, a smug look painting his elderly features. The fact is, he's jarred all of his fellow travellers, has stunned them all to silence.

In a sense, it's like his work is done.

The bus moves again now that there is quiet, now that there is peace again.

For Chase, the world fades away as he stares out of that window yet again, only this time he sees nothing as it passes on by.

He isn't even here right now.

(*)

He 'awakens' when the bus driver nudges him. He doesn't know where he's been or how long he has been there. He remembers precious little of the journey that has passed before.

"Sir?" the driver says.

He blinks.

"Last stop."

"Oh, thank you."

On this, his first day of travelling alone, Chase suffered an absence seizure that has taken him so far from his destination that he is lost.

"Um, how far am I from Princeton Plainsboro?"

"That, sir, is about eight stops in the other direction. You should've called out. I would've stopped."

"I'm sorry, I – "

"You were distracted by Barry, huh? Guess I should've thrown him off when he started getting louder. I guess I just feel sorry for the guy. This is his life, now, backwards and forwards on a bus preaching the word of God to anyone who'll listen. And nobody ever wants to listen."

Chase smiles. It doesn't reach his eyes.

"He's just a little tapped in the head, is all. If you cross over the street and wait at the bus stop right there you'll be able to catch the bus the other way. There should be one in a couple of minutes or so. And you won't have him to contend with."

"Thank you."

"No problem."

Chase finds it difficult to remember Barry, this preaching man of whom the driver speaks. He finds it difficult to remember anything, for that matter, and that scares him. It scares him more than he can imagine.

He looks confused. The driver notices and asks him if he's okay.

"You look a little lost."

"I'm fine, just a little tired is all. I guess I must've dropped off."

"Happens to the best of us."

"Yeah."

He gets the feeling something big happened in the moments leading up to his loss of time and it's left him with a resounding feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach.

"Have a good day," he says to the driver as he slowly exits the vehicle.

That's all he wanted from today.

For it to be a good one.

(*)

By the time he reaches the hospital he's half an hour late. It's no big deal, he works four hours a day around his varying appointments and schedules but he still feels the need to apologise.

"I don't know what happened," he tells Cuddy. "I just blanked out on the bus. I guess I fell asleep."

He doesn't admit to her that he can't remember anything since he left the house this morning, can visualise nothing of the actual journey. He doesn't want her to worry.

"Well, take it easy today. If you're not feeling up to it I want you to let me know."

"I'm fine. But, thanks."

She smiles at him.

"You were never so conscious about punctuality before. Thank you for telling me."

It's another thing that's changed for the better.

"I try," he smiles, weakly.

She finds him half an hour later behind the wooden shelves of the library with a book on his lap. He's leaning against the wall staring into space and when she calls his name he doesn't answer.

"Chase?"

He worries her, this kid. He worries her like nobody but Rachel worries her only in some ways he's more fragile even than she.

She crouches down beside him and still he doesn't move.

"Chase," she whispers softly. "Chase, wake up."

She places a hand on his forehead and something inside of him returns. He reaches up to push it away as if her touch has caused him pain. He looks angry at the intrusion.

_"What?"_

"Chase, I called you but you didn't answer."

He looks around. It's clear he doesn't know where he is but she waits for him to admit this himself.

"I was – I was – "

Clearing his throat he pulls his knees up to his chest as if he's about to stand.

"I was just thinking. I zoned out, I guess."

He smiles.

"Sorry."

"You couldn't hear me, Chase. Is this what happened on the bus?"

"No, I – "

Reaching into her pocket she grabs her torch, shines it in his eyes without warning. He frowns and almost violently pushes her hand away.

"I'm _fine_. Could you please stop?"

"This could be serious, Chase. It could be absence seizures, aura seizures, some sort of cranial bleed. If you aren't honest with me then I can't be objective about this."

"I _am_ being honest. I just – I'm tired. I'm trying to keep up with everything at once and I guess it's getting to me a little bit."

He says it as if it's a failure.

Lowering his eyes, he whispers "I don't want to be treated like an invalid just because I'm tired, Lisa. We all get tired."

"I know, Chase, but – "

" – but we're not all brain injured, right? I'm getting better. You wouldn't have let me at this library if you didn't think so yourself."

Cuddy sighs. She can see his dilemma. Part of him wants to push on now that he's getting somewhere but another part of him just isn't ready for the transition. The segment of Chase that is excelling is warring with the part of him that gets tired easily, gets confused easily and still needs to take things slowly.

She places a hand on his shoulder. There's a niggling thought in her head that tells her she should be pressing him more but she understands his need to take on responsibility for himself.

She'll call House later, let him know that he's been struggling.

It'll just be precaution.

"I'm just tired," he says again, so softly as to be almost unheard.

"Look, why don't you go home for today? Get some rest. I know you've been worried about House. It's a difficult time for you and you're still recovering yourself. You don't need to burn out before you've even got started."

She's expecting the look of panic that he gets in his eyes. She's not quite expecting the desperation.

"I can _handle_ it. I'm not a complete liability."

"Just for today," she reassures. "I'm not taking this away from you, Chase, but you need to take it easy."

"I know, but – "

He trails off before conceding defeat.

"I know."

It is with great reluctance that he agrees with her, that he admits that, yes, perhaps he is taking on too much too soon. Perhaps today isn't the best day for him, despite how it started out. So bright. So fresh. So hopeful.

Maybe he does need to start focusing on his own health rather than trying to take responsibility for House's. It's just so difficult, all of this.

"I'm sorry," he says, "I_ will_ get better at this, I promise. It's just…"

" – it's fine. Don't worry about it. There'll be good days and bad days. You know that. It's to be expected."

Again, he had so hoped this would be a good day.

"Come on. I'll take you home."

As he's packing his backpack to leave he hears a voice that makes it worse saying words he perhaps wasn't supposed to hear. They come from a doctor named Marlow who he's worked with on many, many occasions.

"It's sad, really," Marlow says. "To see what's become of him."

He's not quite sure where it comes from when he turns around, when he glares at the guy and tells him "it's my head that got injured, not my hearing."

It's just another stab of House coming through.

The old Chase would've said nothing at all.

(*)

_Blood._

_Blood on the man's nose. Blood pouring from his mouth. _

_The screams of his men in the corridor citing a falling country should the man in that room die. _

_Chase, a doctor, with blood on his hands that he put there himself._

_Cameron, her pitying gaze so lost and so broken as she tells him "He ruined you."_

Chase wakes up in a cold sweat that night, his breathing shallow, his mind a swirling mess of images that don't make sense to him but make perfect sense at the same time.

His first thought is to call Cameron.

He goes with his second thought and calls Foreman instead.

His hands shake as he dials the number, his head a throbbing mess of emotions that assault him from every angle.

_"Tell me, when Judgement Day comes will you be allowed to pass?"_

_"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."_

The connection clicks through – and all of Chase's thoughts pour out.

"What did I do?" he says, over and over, a record on repeat that's been scratched and abused and no longer knows what it's singing about. "Foreman, what did I do?"

"Chase? It's 2 o'clock in the morning. What are you - "

" – Is it true? Did I do that?"

Chase hears the rustling of covers. Footsteps on floorboards. The creaking of a door.

They're all secondary to the beating of his heart in his ears, in his head, in his chest.

"Chase, calm down. Take a deep breath. I can't understand what you're saying."

He doesn't realise his words are coming out tangled amongst themselves, some taking the place of others and some not being spoken at all. It's like that Rubix Cube he loves so much. The yellow is where the red should be and the green isn't represented at all. His words are a puzzle and he can't even hear it.

"ROBERT!"

The name, the trigger, it grounds him in the moment. He takes a breath, hard and sharp. Foreman's raised voice gathers him to attention where he'd been spinning and orbiting before.

"Foreman," he cries out, his voice a bear croak in his throat. He sounds so young and so small. He can hear it himself.

He wonders what Foreman hears.

"I remember, Foreman. I remember, now, why Allison left. I remember what I...what I did. Oh, Jesus, I remember what I did."

He falls to tears.

"I remember what I did."

If Chase were thinking more rigidly he might know. He might know that Foreman has been waiting for this day to come. The breath he releases down the telephone has been baited for all that time.

Foreman, it seems, proceeds with caution, not willing to step on the grenade that is his former colleague for fear of it all exploding before him.

"What do you think you remember, Chase?"

_What do you think you remember?_

There's that uncertainty. People don't trust Chase's memories. Chase, in this moment, doesn't trust himself.

"What do you think you did?"

It's as if Foreman is hoping for a mistake, as if he's hoping that Chase's memories have given him something coded and fluid unclear; something that can be interpreted any which way and can ripple over the truth like water over rocks or under bridges or anywhere else it can simple run away.

The reality is more solid than that.

That's always been the fear.

"Is it true? Did I really kill someone? A _patient_?"

_A tyrant?_

With that frightened uncertainty in his voice what he's really asking is _"Can you please tell me I didn't?"_

He can hear the pause, the tremble of Foreman's voice when he exhales down the line. In and out. In and out. Chase hasn't the foresight to think of how disturbing a call like this might be. All he thinks about is that dream, those thoughts and the God-fearing terror of knowing he could be capable of something like that.

"Am I a murderer, Eric?"

"Have you spoken to House?"

"No."

"I think you should – "

"_Please_, Foreman."

_Please just tell me. _

"I can't- I can't – "

_I can't tell House. I'm terrified of what he might say. _

"Okay, alright."

He's close to hyperventilating. The weight of this is heavy on his chest, heavier than any dust from that library, heavier than any pressure in his healing lungs. The magnitude of this could-be-truth is immeasurable and has sunk him once before. He doesn't know it but deep down he senses it. He doesn't remember it but he _feels_ it.

"You believed you were doing the right thing," Foreman says, finally. "The man was responsible for so many things, Chase, and you thought you were putting an end to it."

"And, did I? Was I right?"

"You know I can't answer that."

The tremble is still present in Foreman's voice. All of the words are cascading into each other, jittery and quick. Chase has never heard Foreman sound that way before, not ever.

It frightens him.

"Why would I ever think that? Why would I ever believe that I had a right to take somebody's life? What kind of a person was I?"

"You were a good person."

"I _killed _someone."

There's no arguing that fact. There's no taking it back.

Foreman cannot comfort him through this.

"If it's any consolation you never forgave yourself. It…changed you."

This one act took everything that he was and it changed him.

This is not the first time Robert Chase has been reinvented.

"Why did I do it?"

He pushes. Harder and harder he pushes.

He needs this.

Foreman can't give him what he needs.

"I can't talk about this, Chase. I'm sorry. Please, try to understand that it wasn't just you. You're not the only one. You, me, House, Cameron, _all_ of us could be implicated in this and I – "

" – to protect yourself you can't talk to me."

That's the top and bottom of it, the head and tail, the inside and out. It wasn't just Chase that killed Dibala. On some level they _all_ did.

That breaks him.

He implicated all of them because he thought he could cheat God's plan and take matters into his own hands.

Why did he do that?

"I am so sorry," Chase whispers. Over and over he says those words until his voice is no longer there and his mind is no longer able to comprehend the scale of that which he is apologising for.

It's hard to know who the sorry is aimed at. Foreman or Dibala.

Perhaps it's aimed at both.

"I'm so sorry."

It's not exactly absolution but it's something, at least, when Foreman tells him "I know."

(*)

Foreman doesn't greet House when he calls him. There is no hello. There are no gratuities. There is no apology for the Ungodly hour in which he is calling him.

There is just truth.

"Do you realise what time – "

" - You need to check on Chase, House. Now."

"First Cuddy and now you? A bad day at work and all of a sudden he's a critical case?"

"House – "

"If you were so worried, Foreman, you should've admitted him. I'm going back to sleep. If he doesn't wake up in the morning it's on you, not me."

He's about to hang up until he hears the despair in Foreman's voice.

_"House."_

That grabs him.

_"What?"_

"He just called me from his cell. He had a flashback, was asking about Dibala. He was panicked. He could barely make himself understood. But he remembered."

House says nothing.

The only sound is that of his stomach falling out of his body and landing on a churning heap on the floor and it's not a noise that's audible to the human ear.

He swallows. Is that bile?

What is this?

"He's unresponsive, House. I've been shouting down the phone and he's not answering me."

"He does that."

"Yeah, not like this. Not in these circumstances, House."

Of all the bad timings, when House's leg is aching beneath him, when Chase's life was finally moving in the right direction.

Of all the moments Chase's precious God could strike him down it had to be this one?

Jesus.

"Look, I don't think I need to remind you how bad this could be for all of us. He killed a man and we helped him get away with that. If he says anything - "

" – go back to sleep, Foreman."

"You're not listening."

"I'm tired."

His voice is blank, his actions blanker. He's a man on autopilot. He's heard those words and they haven't just sunk in, they've sunk him.

_"House."_

"I said go back to sleep."

"_Damn it,_ House, don't you – "

"If you call me again you're fired."

"House, I mean it – "

The line clicks closed. So does House's sanity. The phone crashes against the wall as House, not in his right mind, throws it. He doesn't know why.

He watches as the pieces shatter all over the floor and he can't help but identify with it.

So much for good days.


	90. Chapter 103

_Once again, thank you to those who have taken the time to comment/PM/review. It kind of keeps me writing, konwing that a few people are still reading :) _

For Chase, the world floods back in a fit of shaking. His body vibrates with the movement, his teeth chattering in his mouth. He bites the inside of his cheek and the taste of blood in his mouth is thick and pungent and coppery. He wonders if he's having another fit until he opens his eyes and sees the fierceness of House's stare, feels the pressure of his hands around the tops of his arms, bruising and hard. Firm and solid.

House shakes him as a last resort, finally seeing what Cuddy saw earlier on today, frightened beyond words by the blank emptiness in his eyes, all consciousness gone, all focus having left him.

"_Look_ at me," he demands. "Don't make me slap you."

Chase takes a breath as if he's been underwater having air into his lungs as if they've been starved of it. The gravity of what has occurred swims through both of them, an iceberg, a tidal wave, and they can either tread water or they can sink and drown. Those are the two options with nothing in between. This is the tip of that iceberg and what comes from this moment is something that neither of them could begin to process in the state of disrepair they're both in.

House feels no pain in his leg. This is so much bigger.

Chase looks him in the eye but cannot cling onto the gaze. His eyes dart wildly, unable to settle on anything. He grabs the front of House's t-shirt with the force of a man ten times as strong as he is right now but the grip is a lifeline and to let go would mean floating away. He grounds himself in this man before him because without that to anchor him he'd be gone.

"Are you done?" House asks. "Have you finished with the amateur theatrics at 2 in the morning?"

When Chase doesn't answer he pushes more forcefully.

"Just stop. **Stop!"** Admitting his weakness he tells him "I'm in _no_ fit state for this. Not tonight, Chase. Not tonight."

He watches as Chase swims to the surface, as he forces his way through the fog and the water that is trying to push him down. It's a big thing that has visited him tonight. It is a thing which changes everything about who he thought he was. It's something the old Chase had trouble with, something that could utterly destroy the new Chase. House is under no illusions about it. He's under no illusions about what might be the consequences of this inevitable revelation.

"How can you even look at me?" he whispers. "How can you _look _at me knowing what I've done?"

"And, what is that, Chase? What exactly _is_ that, do you even know?"

There's vindictiveness in this, in forcing him to face his fears and his truths. There's danger, too. House is treading the knife's edge because it's the only way to put things back in their place. The old Chase had processed this. He had come to his own terms. It had destroyed the person he was but something new had grown in its place. It was over for all of them.

_This_ Chase is a whole different animal.

"I killed a man, House. Me. Just me."

"You killed a man? How?"

"I – I'm not sure how – "

"Well, come on, now, if you're going to turn yourself in – and all of _us_, I might add – you might at least have a story to tell that isn't going to make you look delusional. Is there reasonable doubt in your mind?"

"I _know_ I did it. I – I just don't know how. There was a lot of blood and, uh - "

"'And uh'. The hesitancy, Chase, that makes you an unreliable witness."

He's trying to establish to Chase that there's nowhere he can go with this. He's trying to make him look unstable of thought. He's trying to show him how discreditable he is by speaking of the ways of the law. He's trying to make him understand that this is done, dusted, buried. Cremated, like Dibala was.

"You might've killed a man, Chase, but can you _prove_ it?"

It's confusing, this game of capoeira, this dancing around taking swings and kicks but never quite connecting. Chase feels every word as if they were a strike to his chest but at the same time he's so numb it cannot be felt at all. What is this? What is happening? Who is he and what did he do?

_You thought you were doing the right thing. _

"Why are you doing this to me, House? Foreman_ told_ me it's true. I know."

"It's true, but there's no evidence, Chase. Not anymore. You don't even know what happened."

_Why is he being so pedantic? Why is he looking for precision when all I have is a thought? _

"Why does it matter how, House? He's dead. I killed him. I deserve to be punished for that."

"It _matters,_ you idiot, because there's no way on Earth I'm being implicated in a crime you can barely remember committing. So, tell me. Did you choke him? Stab him? Shoot him between the eyes? If you can't even get that straight then you'll end up looking like a delusional halfwit who needs to be locked away for his own good."

"I'm not delusional."

"No. But you sound it. Wouldn't kindly old Dr Emmett say the same if you went shooting your mouth off to him at your next session? Wouldn't he think you were confusing fact with reality the way you always do? You might've offed that bastard but all evidence says otherwise. We covered your tracks well."

Chase just wants to know.

He just wants clarity.

"Please, just - tell me what I did."

"And implicate myself in your guilt? God, Chase, you really are dumb."

These words, above all, hit Chase where it hurts. He doesn't know why, doesn't know what's different about hearing them now to hearing them before but it _feels_ different. This feels personal. House's irritation towards him feels personal and he can't help but think it's because of what he did.

Maybe it was God's will that he be left down under the ground as punishment for what he did.

Maybe House saving him went against the grain and they're both being punished for it. Who knows?

He covers his eyes with his hands as he tries to come to terms with what he now knows but doesn't know; what he now feels but doesn't feel clearly.

"It wasn't murder, Dr Chase, it was more wilful malpractice."

"Is there a difference?"

He feels House's body beside him, feels his hands as they wrap around his wrists and pull his own hands away. He flinches as House forces his gaze and holds it, needing to get through, needing to break down these unsteady walls he's been building up around this event.

They're as much of a threat to Chase as that building was.

"You rid the world of a homicidal, power-crazy monster, Chase, but you can't prove it. As far as the world is concerned he didn't survive a medical emergency and we did all we could. He was a genocidal baby killer who was threatening to mass murder a whole tribe. You talk of confession all the time, Chase, but he confessed that to you. You did what you thought you needed to do with the evidence presented to you."

_Rape and murder. That's all Chase can think about. A man admitting a disregard for human life. A feeling of terror. Of disgust. Of pity, so much pity for this man's victims. For the people he was planning on killing. For the children who would never know life and peace as long as this man lived. _

"Do you really want to make a martyr of this man?"

No. No, he doesn't. But was it his right at all to decide?

"He told me I couldn't possibly understand."

"Yeah, they're all so clever, these maniacal leaders. Think Hitler but on a smaller scale. And without the labour camps because they're too costly. Does that make you feel better?"

"No, not at all."

_Yes. Yes, it does. _

"It doesn't make me feel like less of a murderer."

_But, it does make me feel justified, somehow. _

"You did what millions of other people would've done. Why else was security jacked up to the hilt? You weren't even the first to try that day. The newspapers were diplomatically rejoicing his death if you read between the lines the following day. You did what others didn't have the courage to do. You did what hundreds, _thousands_, were hoping someone out there would do."

"_You_ didn't try, House, and you're more messed up than anyone. "

"What do I care what happens in some other country I'll never go to?"

"Because you're a human being?"

"That's a matter open for debate. Think of it this way. I recruited you and Cameron to work on this case. What other outcome could there have been? In some ways I orchestrated the whole thing. Or, so people might say. It's what Cameron thought, anyway."

"_She_ didn't kill him."

"She thought about it. She just didn't have the balls to go through with it and if she tells you otherwise she's lying. It wouldn't have been the first time for her either."

That's something for later, House thinks. Something for another time.

"She was a hypocrite for leaving you over this."

"Was she? Or was she just sensible?"

Chase would've done the same, he thinks. At least, that's what he thinks now. Was he so different back then? Would he have stood by while the person he loved played God to an entire tribe? Would he have forgiven her? Or, would he have been so driven away by the cavernous depth of what indeed it all meant that he'd have ran for the hills just like Cameron did?

"She was an idiot."

Chase just doesn't know himself at all.

"I need to tell someone. What I did was wrong. I can't – I can't hold this inside of me. I just can't. I might've been that way before but I'm not now. I'm just not."

"What he did was wrong. What he was planning on d_oing_ was wrong. What you stopped him doing was wrong. But you? What you did was only wrong in the moralistic sense of the word. So you'd take all of us down with you to put this kind of man on a pedestal because your own Catholic guilt won't leave you alone? Are you that self-centred?"

He picks up the phone, keys in 911 and hands it to Chase. The look on the younger man's face is one of utter devastation.

This is a test.

"You want to confess? Here you go. But before you do remember it's not just you, it's _all_ of us."

He sees the conflict in Chase's eyes. He sees the pain that crosses before him.

"We did this. For you."

_And you're going to sell us out? _

"Foreman, he'll be fine. He's been there before. He's hardcore. He's done time. He'll be top dog before his first ten years is out, I'm sure. Cameron, she'll probably appreciate the gesture. Anything to martyr herself – but do you think she'd survive a long stretch on the inside with all those butch hard-timers looking for some distraction? Me? Yeah, the gimp always does well behind bars. Maybe I'll become Kaiser Soze. You never know. It could be the making of me. And you? Well, I'm sure a little blond pretty boy with lips like yours and a head like a cullinder will be the VIP of the block. Just be careful not to drop the soap, Chase, I know what your dexterity's like."

Chase's hand trembles. He screws his eyes closed and raises his fist to the side of his head. It's as if he's trying to knock some sense into himself.

"Chase – "

The warning is there.

**Stop. **

"There's _nothing_ to say that you did it. Dibala's body was cremated because there were fears of someone desecrating his body if it was buried. That's how hated he was, Chase. His records were falsified. By the word of the law he died of scleraderma and we did all we could. _You_ did all you could."

"But that's not true. _That's not true."_

"You already confessed," House says, gentle for him because he has to be. "You went into that wooden box a sinner and you came out absolved. Isn't that what God does? Isn't it as simple as that?"

So small, Chase sounds. So vulnerable, but House knows he's won. He knows.

"I don't remember confessing."

"Then, confess to me. C'mon. Right here, right now. Confess to me and I will forgive you. Because I'll be damned if I'm going to prison for you, Chase. I'll tell you that God loves you and that you are still his son and anything else your storybook needs for me to tell you – but you're not making that call. You're not going through _all this_ just to throw it away over a man that should've been assassinated years ago."

It takes but a few seconds for resolve to be lost. His arm drops to his side, the phone falling to the floor when his hand loses its grip. He sinks down, all resolve lost. He's swimming again, this time against he current and he's sure, absolutely certain that he's going to go under.

"Okay," Chase whispers.

House knows he's broken through. He's neutralised the threat as effectively as Chase neutralised Dibala's. There will be others, of course, just like another ugly head reared itself after Dibala was taken down but there's peace in this moment, and isn't that all that matters? Isn't peace all that matters when the whole world is chaos?

He closes his eyes and presses his hands together.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

When speaking to House, the word takes on a whole new meaning.

"I'm listening," he says. "I'm here."


End file.
